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Cisco Nexus Dashboard from reactive to proactive network operation
September 24, 2021

Cisco Nexus Dashboard from reactive to proactive network operation

Christoph Neulinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Nexus Dashboard

[Cisco] Nexus Dashboard is used by the network department for day2 operations of our ACI-based network environment. With the help of the tool, we can discover a wide range of anomalies and failures in the network. This way, we can [transition] the network operation approach from a reactive/ticket-driven network approach to a more proactive network approach. [We are] fixing problems [...] in the network before they result in a service impact for our customers.
  • Discovering hardware failures in the network.
  • Discovering environmental problems like the high temperature of the devices.
  • Discover deviations from the baseline of the traffic flow.
  • Discover deviations of the CPU usage of network devices.
  • Detect when threshold values of network devices are reached or exceeded
  • Easy to check for problems in the time range when a problem has happened.
  • Easy to see SW bugs that are relevant for the network devices monitored.
  • PBR traffic flows are not recognized correctly.
  • Anomalies can't be acknowledged.
  • Custom filters can't be saved.
  • Reduce impact to customer service.
  • Reduced mean time to repair.
  • Reduced time in proving the network is not the issue.
We use NetBrain in our legacy network, but as [Cisco] Nexus Dashboard is specially designed for Cisco networks, the level of information gathered from [Cisco] Nexus Dashboard is much deeper than NetBrain. The strength of NetBrain, from my point of view, is in legacy and hydrogenic environments, while the [Cisco] Nexus Dashboard is better in a pure Cisco ACI environment.
We found links that are flapping only seldom and fixed the issue. We are aware of temperature problems with some switches and optimized the cooling in the affected racks. We were able to recognize failures in the network and open TAC cases even before there was an impact in the network environment.
For us, it's not yet a single pane of glass for the ACI network as Network Assurance Engine is not yet integrated into the [Cisco] Nexus Dashboard. This will be the case after the next update we plan to do. Today it's a tool I use daily to figure out if something unusual or unexpected happened in the SDN part of our network. The legacy network is still monitored with different tools.

Do you think Cisco Nexus Dashboard delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Nexus Dashboard's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Nexus Dashboard live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Nexus Dashboard go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Nexus Dashboard again?

Yes

Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE), Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI), VMware NSX
[Cisco] Nexus Dashboard delivers a very good overview of the network health at [...] present or in the [past]. Thus, it can help in proactive monitoring and in troubleshooting a problem from a customer to find out if there was any unnormal behavior in the network at any given point in time. Like last night the backup was very slow. As it's able to check a time frame before and after a problem occurred, it helped us find the source of the problem since that source was in the network.