Integrating Cisco DNA Center

[gschramm]

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.

[Krzysztof_Ziemi · Accepted solution]

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, 

[Sennen]

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.

[gschramm]

Hello,

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

Thanks

[y_buccellato]

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

[Krzysztof_Ziemi]

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!

[gschramm]

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.

[Krzysztof_Ziemi]

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!

[gschramm]

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

[gschramm]

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.

[Krzysztof_Ziemi]

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.

[Sennen]

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.

[MartinMarko]

Hi,

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

[MartinMarko]