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This next module zeroes in on one of Cisco's flagship products known as Digital

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Network Architecture or DNA Center. We'll specifically focus on getting

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client‑level information using the DNA Center REST API.

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Here's the lineup today. I'll begin with a high‑level overview of Cisco

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DNA Center and how client health monitoring works.

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We covered the fundamentals in a previous course, so this should be a review.

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Like the previous module, this one is light on slides and heavy on demos.

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First, we'll collect a health summary from DNA Center

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about the clients in the network.

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Sometimes these operations are slow.

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It makes sense to account for this potential slowness in our scripts.

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I'll also demonstrate how to get detailed information for a specific client.

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If you try to get those details for many clients too quickly,

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DNA Center will throttle you.

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I'll show you one approach to avoid that.

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Cisco DNA Center is a networking management system with four main capabilities.

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The design capability allows operators to hierarchically described

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their network architecture by geographic region.

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It can manage software images, device inventory, and role‑based templates.

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The policy capability helps enable Cisco's

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software‑defined access or SDA solution.

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This integrates with a variety of Cisco security products.

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In summary,

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it enables operators to clearly define the

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communication channels between systems.

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DNA Center can also provision devices on the network.

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I've personally used it to stand up virtual servers on a remote

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branch site using predefined images and templates.

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This can reduce installation cost and lead time

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associated with new site installations.

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DNA Center assurance is network monitoring on steroids.

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It combines streaming telemetry and a variety of network management protocols,

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which provide a complete network health picture.

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It also provides suggestions to remediate false.

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In the next clip,

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we will interact with DNA Center using its REST API. In our case,

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we're going to use DNA Center to monitor the health of clients.

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Wired clients, like those connected to switches in the enterprise network,

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are discoverable by DNA Center because it can check the Mac address table on

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the switch and see what devices are connected.

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DNA Center can also get health details for wireless

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clients within the enterprise network.

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These wireless clients connect through wireless access points.

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In my opinion,

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monitoring wireless health can be very interesting because there are

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many individual RF measurements that come into play.

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In this conceptual example, the laptop has a strong signal,

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while the smartphone has a weak signal.

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As the number of network devices grows,

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automated data collection becomes the only tenable approach to monitoring.

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These health details will be reflected in DNA Center and ultimately

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communicated to us via the dashboard or API. DNA Center currently

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supports two client‑related API calls, client health and client

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details. In the next clip, we'll begin by getting a rough idea of how healthy our entire network is, including both wired and wireless clients.