Cisco Nexus Dashboard unifies data center management by integrating network monitoring, troubleshooting, orchestration, management and automation into a single platform. It allows businesses to configure, operate, and analyze network infrastructures through a simplified interface. Cisco Nexus Dashboard leverages automation, predictive analytics, and security features to enhance operational efficiency, improve scalability, and reduce time to resolution for critical networking tasks.
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ServiceNow IT Service Management
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and configuration management.
Nexus Dashboard is a vital tool for Cisco data center Nexus deployments, in my opinion. By utilizing multiple applications in the suite, a business can utilize orchestration, monitor services and traffic, test deployment scenarios, verify upgrade processes and readiness, etc. The capabilities of the system can allow for SAN MDS controls, traditional Nexus NXOS integration, and/or essential ACI tools
In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.
When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.
With the latest version release of Cisco Nexus Dashboard to version 3.0.1 I can say that most of the features have already improved but one of the wishlists that I want for ND is the possibility of extracting lists of Anomaly.
Include older versions of Firmware in the list of choices when doing the firmware upgrade analysis, currently only the recommended is in the list of choices.
If possible, include all the prechecks in the Firmware pre-upgrade analysis same in the script provided by Cisco.
It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!
To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.
For the end user, it is relatively easy to use. However, some training and practice is a must because the NSO is not as straightforward as the traditional router CLI. For the administrator, Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) is just like another program running on the Linux system--there is no big difference.
The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.
Great and effective automation functionalities and the tools on network security management are the best and easy data reports building. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller feature for the network monitoring and easy management of various services and even offers the best analytics and also powerful integration tools for easy data migration.
I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.
To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.
Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.
The Cisco Nexus Series switches perform admirably in our blended distributed system. We have been dealing with any of these sorts of switches for over 5 years and have been exceptionally happy with their functionality. Several of our other computer networks in our data rooms have proved effective with Cisco equipment. Because of the simplicity of maintenance and the high quality of technical support provided by Cisco representatives, there is a high level of trust in these switches.
We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.
The platform is very well done, and to date, I have had no complaints about the implementation of the platform and no security issues or vulnerabilities. Cisco in all its product releases new versions to resolve security issues or bugs that appear on the platform, this is a big plus.
Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.
