topic Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center in Extensions

Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 07:00:29 GMT

We are a big Cisco customer for network equipment, all of it is managed via the Cisco DNA Center.
I got contacted by a colleague who is part of our corporate network operations team regarding log analysis.
Currently they are using Splunk for logs analysis. As it happens there is pretty nice Addon Application for the DNA Center integration in Splunk. My colleagues don't really care about the logs themselves, but the are heavily depending on the app to visualize the current network /device status.

Has anyone tried to integrate the DNA Center in dynatrace via an extension? Building something from scratch will be to much work for our small team.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Krzysztof_Ziemi — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:07:23 GMT

Hello.

This question comes at the right time. Currently we are working on the Cisco DNA extension, leveraging expertise of one of our extension development partners. We'd be glad to see you as an early adopter hear your feedback. We should be ready in a few weeks. Are you interested?

Best regards,

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Sennen — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:43:01 GMT

Hello,

We are currently also onboarding Cisco Catalyst Center (New name for DNAC), if possible we would also be intrested to test the extension. We are not full live yet with CATC, so we can run some tests.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:52:37 GMT

Hello,

what a great coincidence. Yes, we are interested in checking out the extension. I'll let my colleagues know.

Thanks

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

y_buccellato — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:24:15 GMT

Hello, grateful for the update.
Include us as well please.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Krzysztof_Ziemi — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:55:46 GMT

Hello. Catalyst Center (f.k.a. DNA) extension is out. https://www.dynatrace.com/hub/detail/cisco-catalyst-center-dna-center/?query=cisco&filter=all It's 1.0 release, with all the consequences:-) Please start using it and provide feedback, preferably through Community, i.e. here. Thanks!

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Sennen — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:14:20 GMT

Hello,

Should there be a problem creation for the events created in Catalyst Center?

I played around with the "Ingest issues as log messages". I see the event now under "loglevel": "ERROR" & "issue.priority": "P1", but no problem created.
I think it might be handy to have problem creation on those issues by default.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:18:14 GMT

Hello,

I've installed the extension now and connected it to our DNA center. Unfortunately it's barely usable in our environment, I assume it's simply to much data. Most of the charts in corresponding dashboard stay empty and show an error that the measures don't exist.

I'm not allowed to share the number of sites, devices and interfaces so please reach out to me directly.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Krzysztof_Ziemi — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:58:56 GMT

Please open a Support call and our support folks will involve the extension developers to assist in resolution. It might be a sizing issue, but it might be DNAC version, or permissions - too many degreed of freedom to solve it on Community. Thanks!

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

MartinMarko — Tue, 20 May 2025 09:23:52 GMT

Hi,

There is a planned Opt-In feature to report Catalyst Issues as Events too.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

MartinMarko — Tue, 20 May 2025 09:32:19 GMT

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Tue, 20 May 2025 10:18:37 GMT

Done. The version we are using is DNA Center Version we are using 2.3.5.5

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Wed, 21 May 2025 08:54:06 GMT

Hello,

support confirmed that it's a compatibility issue with the DNA center version we have in use. Anyway, I had to deactivate the extension due to the costs. In our environment it's pulling ~21mill metrics / day. That would sum up to over 10.000€ / year, by far too much for a nice-to-have integration.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

Krzysztof_Ziemi — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:56:00 GMT

Thanks for closing the loop on it. Regarding monitoring scope, there are options to limit the number of monitored entities, and thus number of metric data points ingested - by disabling some feature sets. Naturally, it's a balance between usage cost and benefit from having specific DNAC signals in the Dynatrace platform. It won't drive usage costs to zero though.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:36:05 GMT

Hi again,

I've just reactivated the extension to check how well it playes together with the Infrastructure & Operations app.

What we really like is that all the network devices are automatically listed in the network section of the app (8.9k devices, 6 digit network interfaces).

What we are looking for is to use that list to also get the snmp/cisco metrics for the devices.. that would be great step towards actionable network monitoring.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

MartinMarko — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:37:35 GMT

Hi @gschramm ,

You can navigate from the I&O visualization to the extension’s metrics visualization by clicking the Extension button in the device detail view.

Hope this helps.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:53:51 GMT

Those metrics are empty. I assume you have configured the SNMP extension to query these devices, right? I only got 20 devices in SNMP, for those I see all the metrics you screenshotted.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:12:28 GMT

According to the FAQ there is 100k interface limit, we far beyond that. I'll contact support to increase the limit as suggested in the doc.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

MartinMarko — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:25:49 GMT

Please make sure you are using Cisco Catalyst Center API version 2.3.7.6 or 2.3.7.9.

Unfortunately, with older versions only the interface administrative and operational status can be reported. Detailed interface metrics are not available due to API limitations.

Re: Integrating Cisco DNA Center

gschramm — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:54:48 GMT

We are running v 2.3.7.9, so that should be good there.

However I'm constantly getting error from the extension, queries timing out. I've increased the interval from default 1, to 2, to 3 and 5min.. no improvement, it not finishing properly. I'll give it another try with 10min interval.