Cisco Application Services Engine

My main use cases for Cisco Nexus Dashboard are monitoring and network monitoring.

My operations teams coordinate firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard, which aligns with our change policy, which is quite strict considering that we are a critical capability across our organization. I not only use the requirements for firmware upgrades, but also address the policy requirements with embargoes and how it integrates with other products in the space.

The operational trade-offs I have encountered when managing micro-segmentation policies and role-based access control across multi-site fabrics through Cisco Nexus Dashboard center on customer impact and the nature of outages that will occur during changes. The key factor is understanding the end-user impact and what it means for the business.

My teams are operationalizing the AI-assisted predictive analytics and anomaly detection features within Cisco Nexus Dashboard for daily capacity planning and root cause analysis. This breaks down to what is on the roadmap at the moment. We are still in early stages with our AI processes, so that is part of the vision in terms of moving forward with our road mapping.

I still need to review the adjustments required in Cisco Nexus Dashboard's Fabric Controller configurations to accommodate the latency, buffer management, and bandwidth demands of AI training or high-performance compute workloads.

The features of Cisco Nexus Dashboard that I like the most are end-user usability and ease of use for monitoring the network.

The end use cases are straightforward to use with the network and my network team and group.

In terms of managing across the board, it has been straightforward and simple, so it is not a significant issue.

The areas where Cisco Nexus Dashboard can improve involve better understanding of the product and utilization of the AI features and copilot features. As part of our current road mapping with AI, we are still reviewing these capabilities, so improvements will definitely emerge as we continue to use the product.

At this stage, I have no pain points with the product that I would request Cisco to fix.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for the last 12 months.

At this stage, I have no issues with the reliability of Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

I would describe the scalability of Cisco Nexus Dashboard as a work in progress, as we are going through a transformation at the moment in our old DNS network space. As we start growing it, I will discover more about its scalability capabilities.

At this stage, I have no issues with Cisco support. On a scale of one to ten, I rate it a seven or eight at the moment.

What would make Cisco Nexus Dashboard a 10 for me? Ideally, the best scenarios are when I have professional teams on site, but that is not possible because of the cost factors involved, and that would definitely make it a 10. At the moment I have a good account manager from Cisco that I work with, so I have no issues there.

Prior to Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I was not using a similar solution to address similar needs, as the solutions were very much manual and involved a lot of automation activity to get the dashboarding right. Using Cisco Nexus Dashboard as a product has facilitated and improved that and also reduced the lag or downtime, which is a significant feature.

My team manages the transition of configuration state and operational tooling when consolidating disparate data center management utilities into a single Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster, and it is still a work in progress at the moment.

My experience with deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard shows that there are no major issues that would cause any problem with using the product.

I have not seen return on my investment so far from using Cisco Nexus Dashboard, as we are still familiarizing ourselves with it.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that it is still in review at the moment because we review our licensing year on year. I will provide feedback in terms of how we are using it and what the per-unit cost is for the organization.

I considered many solutions before selecting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, and most of them were manual-based, with Power BI being a good example. Much of it had been created by the teams themselves and customized, but when teams move on, that changes.

From my understanding of the product, I rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard between seven and eight.

The reason I rate it seven and eight and not 10 is the full familiarization with the product and having it on site as to what we have at the moment. That would actually change the way we use the product. If we had been using it for a few years, my response would be different than as we are actually bringing it on board.

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is automation. A specific example of a workflow I automate with Cisco Nexus Dashboard is creating a VRF and a VLAN associated with that VRF.

This workflow functions effectively for my team on a day-to-day basis as it requires only a screen click and deploy. Previously, my team had to manage a thousand lines of command lines in configuration, which is prone to human error.

In addition to my main use case, upgrading software iOS is very fast as well.

The best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers are mainly all GUI based, which is beneficial for junior network engineers, and at the same time, automation capabilities such as click to deploy a VLAN.

The GUI and click to deploy automation have reduced half of the resource time of the network, allowing my team to accomplish more work. Since Cisco Nexus Dashboard was newly deployed, I haven't really seen all the benefits yet.

Looking ahead, I am watching specific outcomes or metrics such as deployment time, configuration errors, and team capacity. I am looking to automate how the monitoring works for Cisco Nexus Dashboard, particularly if it is easy to monitor the switches inside Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard could be improved in terms of the flexibility of using the CLI and the GUI because there are instances where it becomes unsynced due to CLI configurations that someone made separately.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for less than a year.

I rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard a seven out of ten. I give Cisco Nexus Dashboard a seven out of ten because my current operation usage of the product is less than a year, so I cannot really make any recommendation.

There is no current policy in regards to coordinating firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard. However, I need to think about how to deploy or process the changes that I plan inside Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to plan ahead.

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to manage our Nexus switches in the data center.

A specific example of how I use it to manage my Nexus switches is when we need to set up the NTP configuration to all of our Nexus switches. All we need to do is set up the policy as a free-form policy, put in the command, and then assign that to all the Nexus switches using attach. After that, we recalculate and deploy, and all the Nexus switches will be set up with the NTP configuration we want.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is also very helpful when we need to upgrade the switch. When we need to upgrade the Nexus switches, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is quite useful. All we need to do is upload the image, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard can provide us with all the validation before we kick off the upgrade. We also have very flexible choices for how to upgrade the Nexus switches. Usually, I go with the second option to avoid downtime because we have vPC peers between two leaf switches and two spine switches. Once we kick off the upgrade, they run by themselves. Once the upgrade is complete, we can go to the other peer, and when we have completed the upgrade, everything will be up and running.

We have a policy in place to handle all of those synchronizations when the operations teams coordinate firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

When consolidating disparate data center management utilities into a single Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster, we have some policy in place that needs to be followed by each of the business units to manage the transition of configuration state and operational tooling.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard has positively impacted my organization by saving a lot of time, especially when we need to have a massive deployment for the new infrastructure team. For example, when they need to spin up a new host or new VM and require a specific port to be configured, we can do a one-click deployment of that configuration to all our Nexus switches that are related to this population.

The time saved by using Cisco Nexus Dashboard has been substantial. I would say it will reduce the time from an hour to five minutes, which is a huge difference.

The best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers include insight about what is happening in our data center traffic. Unfortunately, Insight needs to have another cluster and requires a PTP configuration to be deployed properly. Overall, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is quite helpful with all the alerts and all the insight about what traffic is passing through our data center.

The insights and alerts from Cisco Nexus Dashboard have helped us in our day-to-day work because we use our data center for multi-tenancy. We have three business units in one data center, which we call consolidation. At one time, we got a complaint from a user saying something was getting very slow. We also got an alert from Insight and NDFC telling us one of the interfaces was almost fully occupied. Insight could tell us exactly what traffic was passing through the interface that was causing the latency and what traffic deteriorated the bandwidth. From that point, we could point out and narrow down what the issue was, and then we could resolve the issue faster than if we were doing it manually.

One improvement I would suggest for Cisco Nexus Dashboard stems from my experience when we tried to upgrade Cisco Nexus Dashboard to the newer version. It turned out that the newer version was not being quality control tested properly before it was published on the website, and that caused significant downtime in our data center. We ended up rolling back to the old version. It would be beneficial if every single version that Cisco provides on the website has passed quality control first to avoid that happening again for customers.

Regarding needed improvements for Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I do not have much to add because for the new version of Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I can see that more features have been added. I can now see the contract that was only on the ACI platform, and I can also see all the traffic dashboards that previously could only be found when using Insight. This is good because we now have one stop for everything.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for two years.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is stable.

The scalability of Cisco Nexus Dashboard is quite easy. All you need to do is add another server and add it into the cluster.

Customer support for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is good. We had some issues with Cisco Nexus Dashboard before, and when we opened a technical support ticket with Cisco, the team was understanding and knowledgeable about how to support this platform.

I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten an eight.

We did not previously use a different solution. We managed the legacy Nexus manually one by one before we deployed Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is deployed in my organization on-premises, with two clusters, one in Sydney and one in Brisbane.

I have seen a return on investment in terms of time saving from using Cisco Nexus Dashboard. When we need to deploy something, we can reduce the time significantly from an hour to five to ten minutes.

From the setup we did in-house, it is quite easy to deploy Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Before choosing Cisco Nexus Dashboard, we did not evaluate other options. We went straight to Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

I would rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard a nine on a scale of one to ten.

I gave it a nine because I always believe it has room for improvement. Nothing is perfect, and ten would be perfect. I believe Cisco Nexus Dashboard is a good platform, but not the perfect one because you still need to improve Cisco Nexus Dashboard to be better. I gave a nine because it really helped my team significantly when we need to deploy configuration and manage Cisco Nexus Dashboard and simplify the way we do our work.

I have not explored the AI capabilities of Cisco Nexus Dashboard yet, but if we have AI capability on Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I would be trying to find out what I can learn from that.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that if possible, go with a multi-site deployment rather than having two separate clusters. If you have a multi-site deployment, you have one cluster to manage both data centers, and that will give you more simplified configuration and more simplified error tracing.

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.

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 been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

Optimization is key, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard is more of a data center orchestrator. They bring this whole leaf and spine architecture across the sites. The biggest complex part of a data center is having a layer 2 and layer 3 part of your network extended beyond its own site. That is done very cleanly and easily using Cisco Nexus Dashboard through something called Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator or Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller. Both do the same thing.

It is definitely value for money because now, with big data centers and your data center spanning across multiple places, you do not have to go at every point and start setting up one device at a time. With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, it is a plug-and-play technology. You can set up your network and bring it up to production in nearly no time. You get your return on value as soon as you can.

The biggest benefits are the scalability, the granularity, and the modularity. The design it prefers and the out-of-the-box capabilities and features that it provides are all really good advantages of Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

In terms of features, the orchestration is valuable. The one feature that I really appreciate the most is the day-to-day operations, which is a very smart fault analysis and fault troubleshooting feature called Nexus Insights. That is a very good feature which only VMware has something of that quality. Nexus Insights, which sits along with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, is really good.

End-to-end visibility across the devices and across the sites is really good.

The deployment model is mostly hybrid, but I would say more on-premise and less hybrid.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is very scalable. Even if you have to scale in or scale out one device or one site or 100 devices and 100 sites, it is just a matter of plug-and-play. When we were turning on 100 devices, they were all happening in parallel. That is exactly how it happens with the sites. If you want to add a site, just make sure they are physically connected to a cable which can pass on the message to Cisco Nexus Dashboard. Cisco Nexus Dashboard can take care of everything from there.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is very advanced and very smart, and it has a Cisco brand name to it. I have seen HPE's, Arista, and Juniper orchestrators, and all these vendors have their own. I would not say that they are not smart enough, but they are not as smart as Cisco because Cisco has solved the biggest challenge of the multi-site data center better than anyone else. Over the past 10 years, Cisco has been a pioneer in leading all these advanced design solutions. Everyone is doing it now, but Cisco started it. Everyone copies it at this point and does the same thing, but Cisco is still doing it better because Cisco has been doing this for at least a decade, maybe more than that. Cisco is definitely way ahead. Sometimes people say Cisco ACI or Cisco Nexus Dashboard is hard and complex, but I feel Cisco is way more advanced and way ahead of its market. It has given a NASA-level of technology to normal enterprise corporate networks. It is way advanced.

Cisco is definitely smarter than me, so I cannot think of any improvement because they are already bringing in some smart Hypershield switches. Although that is not a new concept, Cisco is just getting motivation from other vendors who have already done it. The biggest selling point for Cisco is Cisco's brand name and the power of Cisco Nexus Dashboard switches. In terms of innovation, they have already brought in switches like Hypershield and the Hyper-smart switches which have built-in firewalls in them. I think they are already way ahead of time.

I have been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

There was a time when Cisco had buggy software because when Cisco ACI, actually Cisco Nexus Dashboard, used to be called the DCNM back then, these were all new software. Every new software has a bug, which is fine. But over the years, in the last 10 years at least, and now where we stand, I have never seen a random crash or a random bug happening in their software. Ninety percent of the time, it is human error which is causing a problem. Cisco is automating so many things out-of-the-box that they are not leaving things to human error. They are resolving and doing most of the things fully automated. There is less margin of error by humans. In terms of bugs and stability, once Cisco Nexus Dashboard works, I can guarantee it will always work. If it is not working, you have done something wrong.

Some regions in Cisco TAC, like the Sydney region, is really good. The US region is really good, the San Jose one and the other ones. The Indian region, also the Bangalore one, is pretty good, but a few regions in India and some other Asian zones need some better training so they can troubleshoot the issues faster. They take way too long.

VMware, which is now Broadcom, stopped supporting VMM integration with Cisco ACI and Cisco Nexus Dashboard just for the reason that Cisco was able to manage VMware's world to a large extent and people were really loving it. They stopped supporting it with no good reasons just to make customers' lives harder and Cisco's life harder.

In terms of zero-touch provisioning or plug-and-play feature, let us say you have 100 switches and you want to set them all up. To bootstrap those switches, you would need at least 40 minutes per device. That is very aggressive, and it is always more than that. Imagine 40 minutes times 100. You can see how many days you are counting. With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you simply plug in the cables. The bootstrap, if you really want to count the bootstrap time, is reduced to 15-20 minutes. If you count the time that you are spending, that is nearly one minute. Imagine 40 minutes down to one minute. What was 4,000 minutes is now down to 100 minutes. Not even 100 minutes, because now all the switches are getting bootstrapped in parallel. So it is 4,000 minutes down to one minute. That is amazing.

I have been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

The professional services and license is expensive everywhere.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard has its learning curve, but once you do it at least once or twice, it is very straightforward. End-to-end visibility across the devices and across the sites is really good. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

Our main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to ensure that all devices have the correct code and to identify any configuration changes between the leaves. If they are not in sync, we try to have that notify us so that we can go and rectify it.

What I like the most about Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the easier way to know exactly which device is connected to where. It paints a pretty picture, and if there is a link that is down, it color codes it to indicate that you need to pay attention there, among other things. Those are my favorites.

I think Cisco Nexus Dashboard can be improved by making it easier to onboard devices because it is a little hard to onboard devices in my opinion, at least from what I remember. At least that was the case with the previous deployment where we were not using VXLAN technology. The newer version we are about to deploy again for this spine-leaf setup, and I hope it is easier to onboard.

I have been in my current field for a little over 15 years.

The first time when we got Cisco deployed, for some reason, it was not as scalable as how we wanted because the leaves stopped growing after approximately 150 or something. We needed to be scaled much larger, and that is when we pivoted from Cisco to Arista. However, I think it is coming back as they eliminated that problem.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate technical support at a ten because if you do not know something, the TAC guys are going to walk you from end-to-end.

Prior to adopting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, we were using Cisco devices as one of our main switches that we work with.

I would describe my experience with deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard as not that bad.

We do not use any of the providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for three to four years initially, and then got switched to Arista, and now it is coming back again as we just deployed the servers for those who are in the process of setting it up.I do not think Cisco optimizes the experience of a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup because we have Arista in our network too.I do not know how end-to-end visibility from Cisco affects my organization's troubleshooting capabilities.The first time when we got Cisco deployed, for some reason, it was not as scalable as how we wanted because the leaves stopped growing after approximately 150 or something. We needed to be scaled much larger, and that is when we pivoted from Cisco to Arista. However, I think it is coming back as they eliminated that problem.I would rate this review at a nine out of ten.