This next module zeroes in on one of Cisco's flagship products known as Digital
Network Architecture or DNA Center. We'll specifically focus on getting
client‑level information using the DNA Center REST API.
Here's the lineup today. I'll begin with a high‑level overview of Cisco
DNA Center and how client health monitoring works.
We covered the fundamentals in a previous course, so this should be a review.
Like the previous module, this one is light on slides and heavy on demos.
First, we'll collect a health summary from DNA Center
about the clients in the network.
Sometimes these operations are slow.
It makes sense to account for this potential slowness in our scripts.
I'll also demonstrate how to get detailed information for a specific client.
If you try to get those details for many clients too quickly,
DNA Center will throttle you.
I'll show you one approach to avoid that.
Cisco DNA Center is a networking management system with four main capabilities.
The design capability allows operators to hierarchically described
their network architecture by geographic region.
It can manage software images, device inventory, and role‑based templates.
The policy capability helps enable Cisco's
software‑defined access or SDA solution.
This integrates with a variety of Cisco security products.
In summary,
it enables operators to clearly define the
communication channels between systems.
DNA Center can also provision devices on the network.
I've personally used it to stand up virtual servers on a remote
branch site using predefined images and templates.
This can reduce installation cost and lead time
associated with new site installations.
DNA Center assurance is network monitoring on steroids.
It combines streaming telemetry and a variety of network management protocols,
which provide a complete network health picture.
It also provides suggestions to remediate false.
In the next clip,
we will interact with DNA Center using its REST API. In our case,
we're going to use DNA Center to monitor the health of clients.
Wired clients, like those connected to switches in the enterprise network,
are discoverable by DNA Center because it can check the Mac address table on
the switch and see what devices are connected.
DNA Center can also get health details for wireless
clients within the enterprise network.
These wireless clients connect through wireless access points.
In my opinion,
monitoring wireless health can be very interesting because there are
many individual RF measurements that come into play.
In this conceptual example, the laptop has a strong signal,
while the smartphone has a weak signal.
As the number of network devices grows,
automated data collection becomes the only tenable approach to monitoring.
These health details will be reflected in DNA Center and ultimately
communicated to us via the dashboard or API. DNA Center currently
supports two client‑related API calls, client health and client
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.