This is the eighth in a series of blogs, the DNAC Instant Demo tour.
Prior blogs in this series:
- DNAC Tour Part 1: Introduction to Cisco DNA Center
- DNAC Tour Part 2: DNAC Instant Demo: Beginning Your Tour
- DNAC Tour Part 3: General Navigation and Highlights: Dashboard, Drill Down, Assurance, and Troubleshooting
- DNAC Tour Part 4: Getting Started Tasks (Overview): Discovery, PnP, Templates, Provisioning
- DNAC Tour, Part 5: Using DNAC: Design, Inventory, SWIM
- DNAC Tour, Part 6: Exploring SDA Fabric Provisioning, Part 1: VRFs (VNs), GBACLs and SGTs
- DNAC Instant Demo Tour, Part 7: Exploring SDA Provisioning Part 2: Fabric Deployment
Of course, the rest of DNAC is still a lot of GUI to cover. This blog will just touch upon a couple of miscellaneous items and wrap up the Instant Demo tour!
Provisioning Services
>>>Documentation: Provision Services
Tour item: To be mildly more complete, let’s also check out Policy -> Services.
Note the list of items under Services. This is where you can configure the use of various other features or external services. For example, configuring Umbrella or configuring certain devices to do site-to-site VPN.
I’ll refer you to the documentation for what each of these does, as beyond the scope intended for this basic tour of DNAC.
Note that the Workflow area of DNAC may provide step-by-step help with deploying some of these Services. Workflows are covered below.
Other Assurance Dashboards
Tour item: Other Assurance dashboards.
You might take a look at each of the dashboards to familiarize yourself with what is available.
For example:
And
Tour item: The Assurance -> Dashboard Library provides a way to customize some dashboards. Take a look!
Workflows
Tour item: Workflows.
>>>Documentation: Build and Deploy Workflows
If you pick Workflows from the menus, you’ll see:
These are user guides to the steps in setting up various features in DNAC.
Tour item: The Tools menu. Take a look!
We’ve covered some of the Tools.
Some Other Tools
Tour item: You might look at Command Runner, whose function should be rather clear.
Tour item: Also, look at License Manager.
Platform
Tour item: The Platform menu. Take a look! The platform is about DNAC itself.
Explore the four items. These are additional tools.
When you look at Developer Toolkit, note that there is the built-in API documentation for DNAC, grouped by function.
This includes generating a code preview (for CURL, but it could easily be used with Postman as well).
Yes, all that is somewhat of an advanced topic – but you should know it is there.
We’ll skip over the Activities item in the menus. Advanced tasks.
Reports
Tour item: Reports is … reporting. You can set up and run scheduled reports. A number of report templates are built-in!
System
Tour item: System. It is about system tasks and settings. Backup and DR. Take a look!
Explore
Tour item: Explore. The final menu item. It contains links to documentation and other resources for learning more about DNA Center.
Et Cetera
The remaining documentation sections that didn’t really align well with what we covered are:
>>>Documentation: Run Diagnostic Commands on Devices
>>>Documentation: Design Model Configuration
>>>Documentation: Cisco AI Endpoint Analytics
>>>Documentation: Compliance Audit for Network Devices
>>>Documentation: Troubleshoot Cisco DNA Center Using Data Platform
Conclusion
At this point, you’ve seen a lot of what’s in DNAC. You’ve been a tourist, by which I mean observing the sights, but not actually living in DNAC and managing devices for real. But I hope you now appreciate what DNAC can do, and that you perhaps spotted some first things to focus on to make DNAC more useful to you and your peers!
As you start using DNAC, you will no doubt have questions. That is why I’ve included references to the documentation sections, so you can look things up, expand your knowledge, and make even better use of DNAC.
Happy DNAC’ing!
