How to add Area, Building and Floors in Cisco DNA center

Hello guys, I knew many of you are new to operate DNA center and how it works. In today’s article I am going to explain the main steps by which we will add new site in the DNA center which includes Area, Building or Floor.

For Example, here in this article we adding Toronto as an area, The Network DNA with street address as a Building, you can add multiple floors in that area and based on that you can add multiple IP address pools and other things as per shown in the below images.

Let’s start by adding area in DNA center, we are selecting the region as North America and then adding the Area under Canada. Once you login to the DNA center, just go the Design and see below how to add the area.

Fig 1.1

Created the area Toronto by add area as shown below, Make sure the Parent should be

Canada |Global/North America

For adding Area, you should be in Design Phase, under Global and the region you select, as below we selected Canada and under Canada we added area Toronto.

Fig 1.2

Now for that Area, we need to add the Building as shown below and make sure you add Latitude and Longitude for the building which you are going to add in the DNA Center under Site.

Similarly as you added Area, The building should be under you added your area Toronto as shown below.

Fig 1.3

Once you add the Site à Toronto and Building àthe Network DNA in Toronto, you will see below as a snapshot .

Once you added the Longitude and Latitude, It will automatically verify the address on the map and added in your DNA center as shown below. 

So as i added Area and building, similarly you can add floor under the building. Floors can be one or many as per your network design and added multiple floors under the same building.

Fig 1.4

Your site is added now in the DNA center, it’s time to add the IP address pool which you can add as LAN segment, WAN segment, Management and Service. Make sure you check the IP address pool is added under the Network Settings -à IP Address Pool and then click on Reserve.

Fig 1.5

You can also define the QOS policies accordingly, it is shown in the below image and also various other options like wireless parameters, Device Credentials. Other information like AAA server, ISE server with Radius/TACACS information can be added in the Network session under Network settings. 

Under network Settingsà Network, you can add DHCP server info, DNS Server, SYSLOG server, SNMP Server, NTP Server, Time Zone of your area, AAA Server, ISE Server with Radius/TACACS information, Client Information.

Fig 1.6

Now for the basic feature in the DNA center, you can add various images of the devices, here below shown the various images of Catalyst switches as a Physical form factor and you can also add virtual form factor, You can add 5 images and make one of them as golden image as per your organisation.

Fig 1.7

Now you can see there are various network profiles in your DNA center and Authentication Template

Fig 1.8

And the authentication as below

Fig 1.9

Hope with this article you will came to know how to add area, building, floors in DNA center and then what are the other features in the Design phase which can tell you to integrate with the Local ISE server, DNS server, DHCP server and other IP addresses as required and as shown above as well.

In our next article we will show you how to create the fabric and how we discover the devices in the DNA center and then how to add them in the Fabric.

Till then, stay connected and enjoy studying.