Cisco ACI Monitoring Demo

Video Transcript

Software-defined networking has made great strides in simplifying the rolling out of a network. We, at ScienceLogic, have released several videos discussing the SDN space in general. I encourage you to view those if you are interested.

In this video, we are focused both on our product and the leader in the SDN space, Cisco. My goal is to highlight some of the capabilities our product brings to the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure or ACI for short.

Cisco ACI has done wonders for turning the promise of SDN into reality. Yet, organizations we speak with still need a level of visibility into the performance of their ACI systems they simply can’t get from Cisco ACI itself. In response, we worked closely with the ACI product management team to develop the most comprehensive monitoring solution for ACI on the market today.

Let’s dive in.

I’ll start off with an overview of the ACI landscape itself. This is a live environment where we’ve gone out and automatically discovered all of the elements making up a Cisco ACI system. Specifically, we see the leafs, spines, and APICs.

Each of these elements is drillable, so if one shows up as red or if you simply want more information on the performance of a particular element you simply click on it. Let’s drill into this leaf. Here we see a summary dashboard showing key elements related to this leaf switch, specifically:

• Tickets and events
• Overall leaf health score
• Faults
• Interface utilization
• Total drops
• and health scores for various components

We also model tenants. Here you can see the tenant, application network profile, and end point groups.

As with everything else this is all drillable. Let’s drill into the endpoint group. We’re using a simple lab to show this functionality so this is a very simple set-up. But we can see in principle how it works. usually you’d see multiple VMs associated with multiple EPGs (or end point groups), but in this case we have one EPG with several VMs.

Here we can quickly drill into a VM and then see how that VM is associated with host systems, port groups, data stores, etc.

Because our platform monitors the entire infrastructure, we are actually pulling details from 2 sources for this capability. on the one hand, we pull data from ACI for ACI based elements and on the other hand we also pull data from VMware’s vCenter for the VM data and statistics.

Finally we merge the two so we can see, for example, the virtual machines as well as the connections between the leafs and the hypervisors.

We’ve highlighted in past videos how easy it is to build a custom, dynamic dashboard in our platform. So I won’t stress that here. Beyond building your own in 5 minutes or less, our Cisco ACI PowerPack comes complete with a number of powerful dashboards. I’ll highlight two very quickly in this demo.

This one shows a number of metrics related to to the PODs. We see:

• Overall health score
• APIC CPU utilization and memory utilization
• Health scores of the various leaf switches making up the fabric
• Tenant health scores
• Fault counts by type and domain

In this second one we see a simple but powerful example. This very simple application has two EPGs and two VMs with the VMs pinging each other. In this dashboard we see:

• Application health score
• Fault counts for particular tenants the application is associated with endpoints making up the application and health scores of those EPGs

We’ve also brought in data from vCenter to show the KPIs for the VMs the application is running on—so this is another example of where we are bringing in data from many other sources, and here we’ve got things like:

• CPU usage
• VM memory usage
• network utilization
• and disk utilization

Thank you for viewing this video on the ability for ScienceLogic’s platform to discover and monitor your entire ACI system. There are a number of other powerful dashboards and capabilities that come with our product, I invite you to request a demo and see them for yourself.