Oh, shit.
In this video, we want to take a look at a way to manage our network
using a graphical and a programing interface.
It's called Cisco Catalyst, a center.
That's the new name for Cisco DNA center, and you're likely to encounter that term
a lot in much of the literature out there, and even some of the configuration
screens of a Cisco Catalyst Center still, say Cisco DNA center.
So whenever you hear the term Cisco DNA center,
think Cisco Catalyst Center and Cisco
Catalyst Center, that's an appliance that we can install in the network.
Or there's also an option of running a Cisco Catalyst Center in the cloud.
But this is going to give us a graphical interface
and also a programing interface to design our network, to add devices,
to configure devices, to monitor the network, to troubleshoot our network.
And I know Cisco in the past
has had several other graphical front ends for router configuration.
They used to have the Cisco Configuration Professional,
but Cisco Catalyst Center is way beyond that in the scope of what it can do.
Let's take a look
specifically at some of the main areas that Cisco Catalyst Center focuses on.
And first up is design.
With design we can take a map of the world and we can add an area.
And we can say within this area we have a building
or maybe there's another area within this area.
We can import a floor plan into a building
and drag and drop our devices on that floor plan.
And we can say what our IP address allocation is.
This is a way for us to design our network through a graphical interface.
And in addition to that, Cisco Catalyst Center can apply policy.
We can assign policies to an entire group, maybe allowing them
or denying them access to something.
We can do IP based access control.
And one of my favorites is QoS quality of service.
For example, we can set up a queuing profile to say
what bandwidth amounts are given to different applications.
We can also do provisioning with Cisco Catalyst Center.
We can essentially do plug and play for a new device.
For example, we could have a new network device sent to whatever location
that it's going to be installed, have somebody plug it in,
and when that device boots up, it can go out and get some IP address
information from a Dhcp server, including DNS server information.
And it's going to resolve the IP address of a Cisco Catalyst Center server.
And from that server, based on the device's serial number,
it's going to be able to download its configuration.
Sometimes you hear that called zero touch provisioning.
We just set up a profile for that device within Cisco Catalyst Center,
and somebody has to plug it in and it installs itself.
Another big part of Cisco Catalyst Center is assurance.
This is where we can monitor the health of a network.
And it's going to help us tremendously when it comes to troubleshooting.
As one example, we can do something called network time travel.
So if there was some sort of an issue that came up at maybe 2 a.m.
last night, we could go back in time virtually
to see what was going on in the network at that particular time.
And one of the most powerful things about Cisco Catalyst Center
is its ability to act as a programing platform.
It comes with a huge collection of APIs, application programing interfaces
that allow us to program a certain configuration
instead of doing it manually through a graphical interface.
We can do it programmatically.
For example, if we want to do provisioning,
we can do that with a Python script using some of these APIs.
Obviously Cisco Catalyst Center, it is a very robust platform,
and you could go through weeks of training just on Cisco Catalyst Center.
But just to give you a sense for it,
let's go out to a live interface and look through a few of the menus.
And by the way, as a comparison, you might have heard of Cisco Epic.
That's an application policy infrastructure controller.
And the Cisco Epic is Cisco's management platform for data centers.
Well, think of Cisco Catalyst Center
as Cisco's management platform for enterprise networks.
So again, think Apic for the data center
and think Cisco Catalyst Center for the enterprise.
Now let's take a look at Cisco Catalyst Center in action.
Let's go ahead and get logged in.
And notice that the branding is still shows as Cisco DNA center.
And now that we're logged in let's go up to our little hamburger menu.
And we notice we've got those areas that we talked about earlier.
We've got design policy provision assurance platform.
Let's go under design and take a look at this existing
network hierarchy in this sample Cisco Catalyst Center server.
And notice we're looking at a map of San Jose.
And we can see Cisco's headquarters.
And we can zoom in on a particular building.
And I can say I want to view devices within that building.
Let's click on unassigned devices.
We could go in to switch to.
And here we can see information about our Ethernet port states.
And one of my favorite things is configuration.
You can actually see the Cisco iOS configuration for this switch.
Now let's take a look under policy.
We'll open up that new and go under policy.
This time let's say application shows for quality of service.
And let's go into queuing profiles.
This is what I was discussing earlier.
And notice that we have different bandwidth percentages
that have been allocated for different classes of traffic.
Multimedia streaming for example that gets 10%
real time interactive gets 13%, and so on.
And that's an overview of Cisco Catalyst Center.
Cisco's graphical management interface for enterprise networks
and not just graphical.
It can also be used to program with those APIs.