A Natural Evolution from Prime Infrastructure

Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously said, “Change is the only constant in life.” These words have stood the test of time and we see continuous change happening everywhere around us. In this networking blog, we will be focusing on the changing networks and customer demands which are reshaping the IT landscape. Networks are changing, and network management platforms need to change accordingly to allow IT organizations to keep up with the rate of change and new business requirements. We are seeing many IT organizations making the shift from traditional networking architectures to intent-based network architectures and methodologies. We at Cisco are helping our customers move toward secure agile networks through automation, analytics, and policy using Cisco DNA Center.

Cisco customers using Prime Infrastructure to monitor and manage their networks, often ask why they should make a switch to Cisco DNA Center. What value is it adding to the network? The answer varies from customer to customer but common reasons for many customers making the switch are:

• Automate the network and create consistency
• Secure the network
• Bridge IT skill gap
• Reduce the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
• Change the network management approach from reactive to proactive
• More agile network
• Integrate into their larger IT ecosystems
• Reduce the noise and alert fatigue
• Support for legacy devices protecting the customer’s investment in Cisco

While Cisco DNA Center has a lot of differentiated use cases as listed above, this blog post, will focus on and highlight three top-of-mind features that customers adopt:

1. Automation
2. AI Network Analytics
3. APIs integrations

Automation

Gone are the days when the IT teams would spend their weekends upgrading the network. With Cisco DNA Center, you can automate your network upgrades, schedule them at a convenient time and save so much time and operational costs. Our customers have managed to bring down the upgrade time to a fraction of the original time while also reducing staff.

Mr. Komiya, IT Manager at SEGA Sammy describes his experience, “The savings done using [Cisco DNA Center’s] SWIM capabilities alone have covered the cost of Cisco DNA Center. With AI Network Analytics, it is very easy to find issues among 400+ APs and 4K+ wireless clients in a single browser.”

AI/ML Capabilities

Imagine having a 30-year Cisco veteran right by your side helping you troubleshoot issues and do a thorough root-cause analysis, imagine having a 3D wireless analyzer helping you with your wireless access points’ placement, imagine having an intelligent network that helps you with the capacity planning and forecast demand based on the historical trends – sounds cool, right? All of this is possible today using Cisco DNA Center’s various AI/ML algorithms that help you reduce noise and convert insights into actionable alerts.

This is what Mr. Dustin Metteer, Senior Network Engineer at Renown Health feels about Cisco DNA Center, “Cisco DNA Center is like having a Network Operations Center technician 24×7. Essentially, it’s like an entire NOC in one small appliance.”

APIs Integrations

Cisco DNA Center was built keeping APIs in mind. We have integrations with popular third-party vendors like ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Splunk that will make your IT organizations more efficient. You can use these APIs to automate workflows that are run regularly and save time and operational costs. For example, Cisco DNA Center’s integration with ServiceNow allows customers to automate the creation of incidents, approvals, and change requests. With the Splunk integration, Splunk users can create their customized dashboards using data from Cisco DNA Center. Customers can use PagerDuty integration to manage issues and bring down the response time.

Now that we have talked about the unique benefits and value brought in by Cisco DNA Center, take a look at the resources below to kickstart your Prime Migration journey.

Get started with Prime Migration

Additional Resources:

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