Cisco Nexus Insights: Proactive Day 2 Operations

Today’s complex hybrid cloud environments are often composed of solutions from multiple vendors and spread across multiple locations, making it challenging to smooth out application performance and availability.

Operations teams can put themselves in the driver’s seat with Nexus Insights. With better visibility to manage multiple vendors and Cisco solutions, they can proactively identify, investigate, and resolve issues.

With Nexus Insights, operations teams can also:

• Get the detailed data center view. Not only does Nexus Insights collect and analyze Cisco’s best-in-class telemetry, it gives you a detailed view across your data center’s hardware and software.
• Speed up incident response. For data center incidents, Nexus Insights provides several third-party integrations that can shorten mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Automate public-facing announcements. Nexus Insights familiarizes itself with all your deployed hardware and software to create the baseline you need for customized field notices, security alerts, software defects, and end-of-sale/end-of-life notifications.

Visibility across the stack

That same level of visibility extends beyond data center switches. Hypervisor integration is top of mind for customers. The ability to integrate vCenter visibility easily and seamlessly, both at the host and guest level, means the operations team can view critical statistics for application servers and individual applications.

Visibility into the hypervisor host and guest anomaly score and utilization for the CPU, memory, storage, and network helps to verify whether the state of the hypervisor is in some way impacting the performance or availability of your applications. This feature allows Nexus Insights to function as a single source of truth for day 2 operations.

Closely related to hypervisor visibility is application component and dependency visibility. Integrating Nexus Insights with AppDynamics, Cisco’s application performance monitoring (APM) solution, further enhances cross-stack analytics and troubleshooting. Nexus Insights can display the application-specific details directly from AppDynamics for an additional layer of world-class visibility in the data center at your fingertips.

What’s specific to all of the above scenarios—Nexus fabrics, hypervisor integration, and AppDynamics integration—is the presentation of the infrastructure as a topology diagram. Whether you’re investigating the physical hardware, hypervisor hosts and guests, or a specific application, a dynamic, toggle-based diagram that includes component health status and connectivity is there to give you instant insights into the overall state of critical data center components.

Leveraging the ecosystem

On the heels of Cisco’s recently closed acquisition, the Nexus Insights hosting platform, Nexus Dashboard, offers integration with Splunk and ServiceNow to further enhance the day 2 operations strategy. The Splunk integration allows you to add Nexus Insights anomalies to the Splunk data lake to enhance in-depth event correlation and provide historical statistics trending. ServiceNow integration enables the inclusion of Nexus Insights anomaly details and the subsequent creation of tickets and alerts based upon context and severity, further enhancing the IT service management experience.

Rounding out the best-in-class day 2 operations feature set, Nexus Insights provides the ability to send scheduled and IT function–specific customizable email alerts and syslog messages in addition to Kafka message bus support.

With recent modifications to the subscription licensing model, any customer with an Essentials license is entitled to at least a subset of Nexus Insights features. All features were previously made available with either a Premier or à-la-carte day 2 operations license.

There is power in enhanced visibility in the data center. Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Insights support this with third-party and Cisco solution integrations, placing all pertinent information at your fingertips for expedited issue identification and resolution. Contact your Cisco and Cisco Partner account teams for a demo of Nexus Insights today.

Please visit Nexus Insights for more information.

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