Cisco ACI and ScienceLogic Partnership
The data center is easily one of the most consequential areas for IT Operations (ITOps). Often serving as the lifeline for strategic decisions and outcomes, the data center is relied upon to collect, store, process, and sometimes translate data into meaningful guidance and recommendations that increase operational agility.
Except when it doesn’t.
Presently, ITOps are forced to contend with data centers that are opaque, siloed and as a result, highly mismanaged and vulnerable to outages.
And to further compound the problem, data center boundaries have blurred of late. Modern organizations now maintain a global data center footprint with either maintaining multiple data centers across geographies or leveraging public clouds in tandem with their primary data centers to reach their customers across the globe.
These diverse architectures pose a significant challenge to maintain a homogenous policy model across the entire organization’s network. Most of the solutions present in the current market offer, at best, a patchwork approach that does not address the problems of security and policy silos, unoptimized capacity planning and vulnerable blind spots.
Great news: All of that changes today. Cisco and ScienceLogic are teaming up to provide organizations with a single comprehensive data center solution that provides IT Ops with:
- Single pane of glass visibility into an organization’s global DC’s footprint
- Root-cause analytics capabilities for faster MTTR and troubleshooting
- Better capacity planning and network management capabilities
Cisco ACI coupled with ScienceLogic’s SL1 platform provide a seamless data center monitoring solution that transcends data center physical boundaries and supports the Cisco ACI “anywhere” vision by currently supporting Cisco’s multi-pod and multi-site architectures. By combining Cisco ACI’s application-focused policy model along with ScienceLogic’s enhanced IT monitoring capabilities, the joint solution helps organizations to transition to an application-centric data center enabled by Cisco ACI and further facilitate day-2 monitoring and troubleshooting workflows across organization’s entire global network.
At Cisco Live, ScienceLogic will be showcasing the following capabilities:
Context Between ACI and Your Applications
ScienceLogic SL1 provides deep visibility into the operation of your application by first discovering the ACI fabric using ACI’s open REST APIs and further automatically mapping the relationships between the ACI Endpoint Groups and the virtual machines running the applications. Additionally, SL1 maps the virtual machines to other infrastructures such as UCS Servers, Hyperflex, storage technologies, network devices, and application performance management (APM) tools like AppDynamics to provide single console visibility into your applications and the underlying infrastructure thus enabling organizations to manage their data center and global network better.
Dashboard Visualizations for Troubleshooting
ScienceLogic SL1 delivers out-of-the-box, context-driven dashboards that allow an admin to monitor application health and other key KPIs metrics across the ACI fabric. These highly customizable dashboards provide both current and historical data, which along with drill-down capabilities, help admins to monitor and troubleshoot performance trends and issues.
Further, algorithmic capacity forecasting dashboards allow managers to make informed decisions while planning for future application capacity requirements.
Comprehensive Fault Monitoring Across the ACI Fabric
In ACI multi-pod environments, SL1 automatically discovers and connects multiple different ACI fabrics while for multi-site architectures SL1 provides full visibility into the operation of the multi-site controller as well as the connected ACI multi-pod sites.
The solution automatically brings APIC faults and offline infrastructure alarms into the SL1 and correlates them across the ACI fabric. These faults and alarms are mapped onto the dashboards to enable accurate and expedited root-cause analysis and troubleshooting workflows.
As ACI adoption continues to grow, ScienceLogic—like Cisco —will continue to invest in the ACI architecture to provide full visibility into all ACI deployment models including an upcoming update to include support for Virtual Edge. The Cisco ACI PowerPack is available to all customers on our customer portal.