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DNA Center Assurance and Network Data Platform

Today I am going to talk about in details DNA Center Assurance and Network Data Platform which is known as NDP. 

DNA Center Assurance, empowered with Cisco's Network Data Platform (NDP), provides a comprehensive solution to assure higher and consistent service levels to meet growing business demands. 

DNA Center Assurance addresses not just the reactive network monitoring and troubleshooting, but also the proactive and predictive aspects of running the network, ensuring client and application performance.  


Fig 1.1- Cisco DNA Center Assurance and NDP


DNA Center Assurance Benefits
Provides network health visibility through proactive issues and trends. These issues consist of basic and advanced correlation of multiple pieces of information, thus eliminating white noise and false positives.

Provides both system-guided as well as self-guided troubleshooting. For a large number of issues and trends, DNA Center Assurance provides a system-guided approach where multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are correlated, and the results from tests and sensors are used to determine the root cause of the problem, and then possible actions to resolve the problem are provided. 

The focus is on highlighting the issue rather than monitoring data. Quite frequently, DNA Center Assurance does the work of a level-3 support engineer.

  1. Provides in-depth health scores for the network and its devices, clients, applications, and services. Client experience is assured both for access (onboarding) and connectivity.
  2. Provides detailed application experience analysis from global > site > client.
  3. Provides visibility in policy compliance.

Network Data Platform (NDP)
Companies are dealing with an abundance of network data. Tackling the volume, variety, speed, and accuracy of network data is a serious problem with IT organizations. Cisco's Network Data Platform (NDP) is designed to handle this network data problem. 

DNA Center Assurance is empowered by NDP. NDP is a multipurpose, real-time, network data collection and analytics engine used to significantly increase the business potential of network data. 

NDP simplifies and abstracts the collection and analysis layers and offers a rich set of API’s along with a web interface. By using a single set of network data, NDP powers a broad set of use cases. These efficiencies streamline the operational and network management overhead of collecting and analyzing network data, thereby allowing companies to effectively focus on their business goals.

Given its flexible architecture, NDP addresses many common use cases including monitoring and troubleshooting, cost management, and policy discovery, while supporting Cisco’s broader DNA strategy.  

NDP architecture is as follows: 

  1. Data Collection and Ingestion—NDP leverages streaming technologies to collect a variety of network telemetry and contextual data in real-time. 
  2. Data Correlation and Analysis—As data is ingested, NDP correlates and analysis the data. 
  3. Data Visualization and Action—The data is stored in databases and exposed through APIs to DNA 

Center Assurance as well as other applications, such as Capacity Planning. NDP is an open system, that provides the following:

  1. Collector and analytics pipeline SDKs  
  2. Time series analysis
  3. Graph data models and restful APIs  
  4. System management portal