Cisco DNA Center, AIOps and You – Cisco Blogs

If you were a kid like me, when you thought of your future job you pictured yourself ala George Jetson. Leaning back on a chair, pushing a button or two and letting a computer handle the rest of your work. It looked like a sweet setup—Mr. Spacely aside. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was my first exposure to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).

It looked amazing.

While the future might not be quite as awesome as the way the Jetsons portrayed it—my Roomba is not nearly as sassy as George’s robot maid Rosie—the AI/ML of a wireless network is getting to where it needs to be. And it’s being driven there by Cisco DNA Center. One of the myriad ways that Cisco DNA Center is making the future brighter is by augmenting AIOps.

If you don’t know what AIOps is, it allows organizations to use AI and ML to get real-time insights from their networks and then turn that data around and automate tasks to assist your IT operation staff. In other words, DNA Center analyzes how your network is running and then it takes that information, dissects it and then uses it to run your network more efficiently. The best part is that this whole process is done automatically.

So what’s the value? The biggest value is in Cisco DNA Center saving time for your IT staff by automating: device software management, software conformance and patching, troubleshooting/root cause analysis, complex network tasks, event triage, third party integrations and more.

Time is the most precious commodity of all, and everyone can use more it. So instead of making sure that the busy work of making sure that a gaggle of new hire’s policy permissions are complete, Cisco DNA Center will do the job correctly. That way your IT techs can continue on with one of their bigger projects—you know the one that they’re always meaning to start but can’t because these everyday time suckers get in their way.

Another benefit is that Cisco DNA Center bridges the skill gap. This works hand-in-hand with the previous feature of saving time. On every IT team, there are the newbies and the grizzled veterans. When a newbie gets a ticket or a problem that they can’t fix, they immediately bubble it up to the grizzled veteran. There’s no shame in this, it’s what a newbie does—that’s why they’re newbies.

But the problems that come along with this way of doing things is two-fold: the first being that whatever project the grizzled veteran is working on needs to stop so he or she can handle the issue. It may be a (relatively) easy fix, or it may become a quagmire. The point is, they stopped doing what they were doing to pitch in and lend a hand. While unquestionably the right thing to do, this teamwork ultimately costs time and money.

Secondly, and most importantly, when a newbie gets these issues, they don’t learn anything. The only thing that they learn is whom to send their problems to. A grizzled veteran doesn’t have the bandwidth to show the newbie how to solve their issue, they need to get the problem fixed and move on with their day. The newbie stays a newbie for a while longer.

With issue remediation using the machine reasoning engine (MRE) Cisco DNA Center defines the issue, and then a fix (or fixes) is suggested and all that needs to be done is to click that solution and the issue is solved. With this feature, suddenly everyone is the grizzled veteran. Here are some of the ways that DNA Center bridges the skill gap:

• Event correlation
• Guided remediation
• MRE workflows
• Contextual help

Thanks to Cisco DNA Center, now everyone on your team is up to speed and able to fix network issues with the click of a button. And suddenly the new people in the group are solving issues like your pros. And for the pros out there, these features streamline your job so you can get more done. Why would you want to open a CLI window and type in a series commands to see why there is a power supply failure, when you can simply press a button and let Cisco DNA Center execute those same commands?

Cisco DNA Center isn’t just a boon for your IT department, there are more than a few business values here as well. It breaks the inevitable silos that occur in your operation. How?

• Integrating NetOps with ITSM
• Leveraging AI/ML through Devops
• Cross-domain data sharing

It’s not just bringing your teams closer together, Cisco DNA Center streamlines business flows too:

• Application optimization
• WAN optimization
• Digital experience optimization
• Change analysis

Whether it’s smashing down the walls that divide your organization or making sure that your IT department gets more time to do what’s important, Cisco DNA Center is the tool needed to modernize your organization and get the job done.

And AIOps has become such a useful solution, that no one will ever hear you yell, “Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!”

Learn more about Cisco DNA Center.

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