Nexus Dashboard - Single plane of glass for monitoring our DataCenters
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Purpose of selecting and on boarding Nexus Dashboard was having a deep visibility into our DataCenter Networks.
There have been a range of tools and software that we have and are available in market to monitor Networks, but there was nothing like ND that we had heard of before we decided to onboard it.
Though our primary use case was visibility 3 years back when we purchased this product, we got modules like NAE and NIA complementary. But over a period of time we have consumed the information provide by these module and got used to it.
Finally it was great to realize that Cisco integrated all the 3 modules NIR, NIA and NAE into one, which is Network Insights now.
Being an early adopter of this product we have come a long way, from the days when we gave a hard time to our Cisco account management team for bugs and instability in the product, to a position wherein we have that advantage now of knowing and using this product to its fullest with all the new features and improved stability.
There have been a range of tools and software that we have and are available in market to monitor Networks, but there was nothing like ND that we had heard of before we decided to onboard it.
Though our primary use case was visibility 3 years back when we purchased this product, we got modules like NAE and NIA complementary. But over a period of time we have consumed the information provide by these module and got used to it.
Finally it was great to realize that Cisco integrated all the 3 modules NIR, NIA and NAE into one, which is Network Insights now.
Being an early adopter of this product we have come a long way, from the days when we gave a hard time to our Cisco account management team for bugs and instability in the product, to a position wherein we have that advantage now of knowing and using this product to its fullest with all the new features and improved stability.
Pros
- Visibility - Fabric stats/counters, telemetry flows
- ACI Snapshot Tracking - EPOC management and delta on demand
- Understanding Impacts of Changes in ACI and Implementation
- Micro burst and buffer monitoring which becomes a very critical aspect of running Storage on IP in DataCenter environment.
Cons
- Flow Telemetry - Need to overcome the restrictions of 20000 flow/sec. No DataCenter is small enough to pump only 20K flows per second. And we want to use this product for proactive monitoring so we cannot decide on a small segment to monitor flow for beforehand.
- Creating tags and label for clubbing certain entities so that we can create customized dashboards to monitor and provide access to Operations team
- Scheduled Reports and Reporting capability is lacking
Return on Investment
- We were able to isolate and provide insights on bursty storage traffic
- All our changes are now planned, tested and implemented using NI (around 600-700 changes per year)
- Complete DataCenter upgrades based on bug scrub and advisories from NI
Alternatives Considered
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Other Software Used
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
