Cisco Nexus Dashboard

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to manage the data center switches and the respective versions of the switches, deploy configs, and manage the data center connectivity. One of my most primary use cases was centralized management and configuration of my two data centers located in Sydney and Melbourne, where I used it to manage Cisco Nexus switches, deploy VLAN configurations, and implement VXLAN architecture while migrating legacy services to the new data center infrastructure and achieving centralized visibility and operational management across both environments.

In my environment, I used Cisco Nexus Dashboard as a centralized platform to monitor and manage the network infrastructure across both data centers, which gave me visibility of the fabric topology, switch connectivity, and overall health. I managed my VLAN and VXLAN configurations, made changes, deployed those changes consistently across switches, and diagnosed configuration or connectivity issues swiftly to maintain consistency between the two data center environments.

Regarding my main use case with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I had an issue initially in my deployment where the Insights module was very processor and CPU intensive, which blocked my progress on migration and required me to uplift my server requirements to properly deploy it to gain those insights.

The impact of Cisco Nexus Dashboard on my organization has been significant, improving operational efficiency by providing centralized visibility and management across my Sydney and Melbourne data centers, while reducing the need for manual configuration on individual switches and maintaining consistency during VLAN and VXLAN changes.

In terms of metrics, although I did not formally track exact percentage improvements, I noticed practical benefits in my day-to-day operations, where centralized configuration deployment cut down tasks that previously took several hours to just one hour. I observed a reduction in troubleshooting time by approximately thirty to forty percent.

Among the best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers, I particularly appreciate its centralized fabric management, topology visibility, configuration deployment and consistency, offering a single platform to manage multiple data center fabrics while simplifying operational management, reducing manual configuration effort, and ensuring health monitoring and integration with different Cisco data center applications.

The health monitoring and visibility features allowed me to monitor switch health, fabric connectivity, interface statuses, and overall topology from a centralized dashboard, enabling me to troubleshoot and resolve connectivity issues faster during service migrations, particularly when an interface problem arose.

I would also like to highlight the centralized configuration management and operational consistency, where rather than manually configuring individual Nexus switches, I could manage and deploy configurations through Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which proved especially useful during VLAN and VXLAN changes and data center migrations.

Regarding improvements to Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I think there is room for enhancement in dashboard responsiveness, simplified workflows for configuration deployments, more detailed troubleshooting insights, better integration with third-party monitoring and automation tools, alongside improved reporting and more actionable alerts to help engineers identify potential issues faster across multiple data centers.

As for further improvements, I have noticed that during configuration deployments, the exact reason for deployment failure is not consistent across switches, leading to additional investigation issues, which could be resolved with more consistent error reporting.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for the past six to seven years, predominantly in my role where I deployed Cisco Nexus Dashboard to manage my data centers.

Regarding stability, I can confidently say that Cisco Nexus Dashboard has been stable since its deployment in my production environment, allowing reliable centralized management and configuration across both data centers, although it does require regular software maintenance and monitoring.

Regarding scalability, Cisco Nexus Dashboard proves to be scalable as it allows for the addition of more physical hardware while increasing workloads; however, this can become costly and quite CPU intensive when considerably scaling within my specific environment.

Customer support from Cisco has been fantastic, with both Cisco and my partner, Telstra, being engaged throughout the project, ensuring everything went remarkably well. In rating the customer support, I would give an eight out of ten, as my experience with Telstra's technical team during the initial deployment and ongoing operational support has been notably positive.

Prior to Cisco Nexus Dashboard, my previous solution was a legacy data center solution, characterized by a three-tier architecture which required excessive manual effort to deploy changes, configure switches, and carry out operational tasks, making server migrations and workload changes very tedious.

Within my organization, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is deployed as an on-premises solution using dedicated physical hardware in my data centers in Sydney and Melbourne, set up with support from my client vendor, Telstra, following an N+1 availability architecture for maintaining centralized management within my controlled environment.

Before selecting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, my main considerations were tied to Cisco's data center networking ecosystem, where alternative solutions like Data Center Network Manager were evaluated, but I was not deeply involved in final product evaluations. I did consider several other vendors such as Palo Alto.

In rating Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I would rate it nine out of ten because it has been very effective in my environment, simplifying operations and management across both data centers, though I would not give it a perfect score due to the need for more detailed root cause information in troubleshooting, particularly concerning failed configuration deployments. The reason I choose a nine out of ten rating is its effectiveness in simplifying operations and management across my data centers, while I believe it could move closer to a perfect score if it improved on providing detailed insights for troubleshooting scenarios and enhanced reporting and automation capabilities.

In terms of governance and security related to Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I consider these aspects critical in a production data center environment, where it offers role-based access control, centralized authentication, and controlled configuration management to ensure only authorized engineers can make network changes alongside features like audit logging, change traceability, and maintaining data privacy across both data centers.

On the topic of Cisco's AI capabilities, I find that while AI-driven insights are valuable for identifying potential network issues and supporting troubleshooting, they should not replace engineering judgment, and recommendations need to be manually verified as they can sometimes diverge from the actual situation.

To others considering Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I highly advise evaluating the current environment and conducting a Proof of Concept to ensure it fits your network demands, as every environment has unique needs.

I have been dealing with Nexus switching for more than four to five years. I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard since approximately one and a half years ago, and I am currently pitching it mostly to my existing customers who have Nexus infrastructure and who did not want to pursue an ACI environment.

Regarding data center networking, I am working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Cisco switches, and Nexus completely falls under my responsibility.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is in use today, and we are proposing it to many customers.

Speaking about the end-to-end visibility that Cisco offers, my impression is that any kind of visibility comes from historical telemetry data, which is a time-series database. The same principle applies whether it is Cisco DNA Center or Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which also stores historical telemetry data. For example, if a certain service running has a crash, I can review the network conditions from approximately ten to fifteen minutes prior to the crash using the time-series database historical telemetry data. Cisco Nexus Dashboard also has certain machine learning capabilities that detect unexpected patterns, such as when CPU utilization exceeds eighty percent. It can provide alerts for deviations beyond baseline patterns. Additionally, it supplies detailed flow telemetry, including source and destination IP, which aids in connective analysis.

In terms of areas for improvement in Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I feel that the only issue is the licensing, as advanced features like insights require a Premier subscription. However, I think these features might also be needed in the Advantage tier. While there are limitations, they have introduced flexibility for deploying in a virtual machine.

When discussing stability, Cisco products are generally stable and reliable, although we may encounter some software glitches. However, hardware performance is solid even with older models still in operation without ongoing support.

In terms of significant differences between Arista and Cisco, Arista takes a multi-vendor approach while Cisco Nexus Dashboard remains mostly Cisco-centric. Arista's CloudVision connects through protocols such as gRPC, and while it offers better scalability for campuses and data centers, Cisco Nexus Dashboard has limitations regarding the number of switches supported per cluster, particularly when scaling on a global level.

Technical support from Cisco is adequate. I recently received good support while integrating Cisco Wireless with Fortinet authentication.

When comparing Cisco with other vendors in the market, I have seen CloudVision from Arista.

Regarding the installation side for Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I can say it is not overly complex, as my team has not encountered significant challenges during deployment.

Hypothetically, they could add features in the future, and they might be planning some integrations based on their product documents.

Customers who have adopted Cisco Nexus Dashboard experience benefits due to their existing Nexus infrastructure, which typically includes twenty to thirty switches arranged in a leaf and spine architecture. After moving from FEX to leaf and spine, one customer wanted greater control instead of managing on a box-to-box basis or through the command line interface, and they benefit from the improved management and visibility that Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides.

For those customers that have already adopted Cisco Nexus Dashboard, if I want to get full visibility and insights, I need to go for the Premier subscription. Each node type has limitations regarding device quantity management, which is acceptable as long as we are aware of the licensing requirements to access full insights.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

I acknowledge that some of our customers are using Cisco Enterprise routers. I have been dealing with this product for more than a decade. I generally recommend Cisco Enterprise routers for types of companies that almost only require enterprise routers, which is about 2% to 3%, not more than that. These are very rare cases we are providing. I am not that much familiar with routers in general, and I am only talking about Cisco routers.

I can tell several advantages of Cisco Nexus Dashboard like centralized management that allows managing and monitoring multiple Nexus switches and data center fabrics from one platform. It provides multi-site visibility because of the visibility across multiple data center sites. There are plenty of parameters, and the automation is more advanced than it was earlier, which has reduced manual work in automation. Real-time monitoring, health performance, and network status visibility, as well as analytics, both historical and real-time telemetry, help identify performance issues.

End-to-end visibility refers to the reliability from the application to the end user. This is a major benefit, as it includes application to networking visibility, traffic flow visibility, fabric-wide health monitoring, interface error and packet drops, latency and performance monitoring. Cisco Nexus Dashboard also provides multi-site visibility and proactive identification of network issues.

In terms of improvement with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I see integration limitations, as it has some limitations when it comes to integrating the fabrics. They can expand that enablement to add multiple products inside.

In the future, I would like to see full-fledged AI integration and self-healing technology included. If any failure occurs, integrating AI could help minimize downtime without requiring manual intervention.

I have been dealing with this product for more than a decade.

I would rate the stability of Cisco Nexus Dashboard as high. I can give it a rating of 10 out of 10 for reliability and stability.

In terms of scalability, Cisco has lots of limitations, and unnecessary licensing will be involved. This can be quite difficult, especially when other brands provide these features at no cost. For instance, enabling an additional SFP port in Cisco generally requires the customer to take an additional license for that particular port.

I give recognition to Cisco for their technical support; they provide very good support. They address issues based on the CON-SNT support that is opted by customers. It is good support if you ask me. I can rate their technical support five out of five.

That being said, you can take it as 4.5 out of 10, because sometimes there may be delays.

I describe my experience with deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard as slightly complicated when compared to other products. Cisco has different algorithms and terminologies. With 100 brands available in the market, 99 of them have the same templates to deploy, but Cisco has different algorithms. Only certified Cisco engineers can do it easily; otherwise, it can be quite difficult for an average user.

In terms of pricing, Cisco products, including Cisco Nexus Dashboard and others, are very high compared to competitors. I am supplying materials across the globe for most of my projects in metro areas. Whenever we are bidding, Cisco prices are very high. For example, one transceiver for 10 Gig or 25 Gig connectivity costs around two lakhs in INR. If I go with some other reputed brand like Aruba, that cost will come around only 60,000 INR. In dollars, one transceiver costs around 20,000, while in Aruba it is almost 6,000.

We are selling HP along with Cisco for servers, as Cisco servers are already obsolete. They have been discontinued, and there are no Cisco servers available in the market any longer. The highest market share is held by HP and Dell. Dell is also part of what we sell.

As of now, I do not have an idea about whether Cisco optimizes the experience in a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup. Integrating AI would take care of all aspects. A single prompt would be sufficient to enable it, whereas competitors such as Juniper and Aruba have already incorporated AI integration and self-healing networks. I have given Cisco Nexus Dashboard an overall review rating of 7 out of 10.