Elevating network success with telemetry

Network visibility is the ability of management tools to see the state and behavior of a network, which is essential for successful network operation. According to the IETF, Network telemetry is a technology for gaining network insight and facilitating efficient and automated network management. It encompasses various techniques for remote data generation, collection, correlation, and consumption.

Network Telemetry refers to both the data itself and the techniques and processes used to generate, export, collect, and consume that data for use by potentially automated management applications. It extends beyond the classical network Operations, Administration, and Management (OAM) techniques and expects to support better flexibility, scalability, accuracy, coverage, and performance.

Traditional network management technologies, protocols and probe-based solutions such as SNMP, Syslog, CLI scripts, NetFlow, and IPFIX are mostly reactive, sequential, unstructured, and centered on the health and performance of individual network elements using pull mode. They are unable to meet the growing data needs of a distributed hybrid cloud network environment. Moreover, the network tools themselves are siloed by their data capture mechanisms. Focus has historically been on speeds and feeds and scaling the network horizontally while containers and virtualization also added exponential traffic and complexity. The challenge is multidimensional, where architectures are both horizontally and vertically scalable.

Telemetry Benefits

Network telemetry key benefits can be categorized into four buckets as listed below:

“Network Telemetry from Cisco Nexus Dashboard has helped us with network data by providing insights about the current state of the network, including network devices, forwarding, control, and management planes, with ease. What was generated and obtained through a variety of techniques, is now easily available from a single interface, namely Nexus Dashboard.”
– Curt Poage, Data Center Technical Lead for Cisco IT.

Use cases

How can operators transform network operations/monitoring and practices to be more proactive and application, user and business-centric?

Nexus Dashboard receives the network telemetry data from the network devices and controllers. It obtains the fine-grained visibility through the telemetry data, including both the control plane and the data plane operations and performance. It analyzes and learns about the baseline behavior of the network and detects anomalies in the network. The anomalies are reported to the network operations team through the user interface or via email notifications and can be sent to other tools via programmatic methods, such as Kafka export or direct API calls.

The need of the hour for cloud and digital era network monitoring is to correlate individual element information not only from the network as a whole but also from the applications that rely on it. The agility demanded by digital business, cloud and dynamic infrastructure requires lower mean time to repair (MTTR) and detect (MTTD).

Nexus Dashboard telemetry enables a sample of use cases possible listed below:

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard’s capability of managing and correlating granular network telemetry, operators have real-time network visibility and can proactively take actions based on the network situational awareness, by leveraging innovations in analytics. The analytics engine optimizes collection and storage, accelerating troubleshooting and automating problem resolution. We are also helping our customers deliver high performance IT by future-proofing their investment with the emerging AIOps methodologies.

While these capabilities leading to compelling business outcomes are the core competency of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard, it also enables operators to be able to use the network full stack to its maximum potential to meet SLAs and realize ROI.

To learn more about Cisco Nexus Dashboard please use the below resource links.