Announcing Cisco Nexus Dashboard Open Ecosystem with Splunk

Cross-tier Visibility and Troubleshooting On A Single Pane of Glass

Today marks an important milestone in Cisco’s Cloud Networking offerings to our customers with the unveiling of new solution for Cisco Nexus Dashboard with our strategic ecosystem partner: Splunk^®. We are very excited to announce the availability of “Cisco Cloud Network Insights” App and Add-on for Splunk Enterprise.

This announcement comes on the heels of Cisco’s unveiling of the Nexus Dashboard 2.1, a single pane of glass agile platform for full lifecycle multi-cloud networking automation and operations to deploy, operate and manage your infrastructure with ease. In Nexus Dashboard 2.1, we introduced open APIs and platform capabilities for 3^rd party developers to build Apps and services on Nexus Dashboard, thereby giving our customers the choice and flexibility to seamlessly integrate with existing IT software tools in their multi-cloud networks.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard, along with “Nexus Dashboard Insights” and “Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator” offers a rich suite of platform services, open REST APIs and Kafka subscription service for third-party developers to build custom applications and integrations. Leveraging these open APIs and platform services, we released out-of-the-box tools that unlock valuable use cases through integration with Splunk Enterprise.

Today, we are proud to congratulate our strategic ecosystem partner Splunk for the collaborative effort and highlight use cases these integrations unlock. Our announcement also comes with the resounding support and testimonial from Splunk:

“Together, Splunk and Cisco help our joint customers minimize operational and security risks, drive informed decisions across the organization, and ultimately transform their businesses. Cisco’s vision for network telemetry and proactive network operations aligns with Splunk’s focus on enabling a proactive, predictive approach to IT, and we are excited that our long- standing partnership has been expanded to include Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard Insights.”

—Carol Chui, Splunk Strategic Alliances Director for IT Operations Ecosystem Strategy

Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Splunk

Cisco and Splunk have a strong partnership built over the span of a decade to deliver integrated solutions to our joint customers across Cisco Cloud Networking, Compute and Security. Splunk is one of the earliest integrations with products in our Cloud Networking portfolio, including Cisco ACI, NX-OS, Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (formerly Multi-Site Orchestrator) and Network Assurance Engine (now within Nexus Dashboard Insights). With compelling use cases and by popular demand from our customers, we developed the Nexus Dashboard Insights integration with Splunk Enterprise.

The Nexus Dashboard Insights and Splunk integration enables customers to gain deeper insights into the operational state of their infrastructure, accelerate troubleshooting, and improve operational efficiency.

Solution benefits

Get comprehensive network insights and simplified troubleshooting
Visualize real-time, contextually relevant network insights
Create automated alerts for network problems, errors, and conflicts
Correlate multitier and multidevice anomalies, advisories
Perform flexible, query-driven searches for anomalies and advisories over time
Analyze trends related to anomalies and advisories over a specified period
Create rules that automate the response of the network to recurring events

The solution consists of two components – “Cisco Cloud Network Insights” Add-on and App for Splunk Enterprise. The Add-on ingests rich data related to Nexus Dashboard Insights anomalies and advisories in a Common Information Model (CIM) compliant format that enables customers to

Monitor unique KPIs and compliance metrics with custom dashboard and drilldowns to monitor specific anomalies and advisories
Prevent outages through custom alerting for specific anomalies and advisories
Build cross-tier correlations with the data from other tiers, such as applications, compute, and security

Cisco Nexus Dashboard customers can download the App and Add-on from Splunkbase.

Support from Cisco TAC is available through Cisco Solutions Support.

Looking forward

This is just the beginning of our journey in offering customers choice and flexibility with Nexus Dashboard 3rd party technology partner Apps. In near future, we will be adding newer capabilities to the Splunk solution that we announced today and will be expanding the Nexus Dashboard 3rd party App ecosystem integrations to include other categories such as Application delivery controllers (ADCs), ITSM/ITOM (IT Services Management and IT Operations Management), alerting tools, Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and security management.