ITERATIVE NETWORK AUTOMATION USING CISCO DIGITAL NETWORK ARCHITECTURE CENTER (DNAC) DAY N TEMPLATES

Technology

Cisco Digital Network Architecture Center (DNAC) empowers businesses to design, provision  and assure their enterprise networks. The DNAC platform provides a centralized GUI for all  network related tasks and functions, enabling network operators to configure and provision  thousands of network devices at increased speed and scale. Manual operations and  associated human errors are reduced via task automation. The benefits for the business are  network deployment consistency and increased uptime.

Challenge

Our customer wanted to leverage Cisco DNAC to push configuration amendments  to their Cisco Catalyst switch device estate. The goal was to automate repetitive  configuration changes to reduce human input errors, and, increase speed of change delivery. A centralized repository was required to act as a single “source of truth” for  all configuration data. Additionally, it was necessary to maintain strict control over all  templated configurations.

Solution

By using DNAC Day N templates, Metsi was able to deliver several benefits to the  customer. First, templates for configuration changes were centrally controlled on  DNAC with only approved personnel able to make amendments to them. Second, once the template was ready to deploy to the switch estate, it was automatically pushed at a  time of choosing during a maintenance slot across multiple sites. Finally, DNAC was able to  demonstrate which switches the template had been successfully deployed to for accounting  purposes.

Summary

Metsi provides networking services for the design and implementation of the Cisco  DNAC platform, for Proof of Concepts (POC) and real-world rollouts, in both  greenfield and brownfield deployments. Metsi DNAC engineers facilitate the  realization of all DNAC features for enterprise customers, including automation,  segmentation and assurance. DNAC automation standardizes repetitive network operations  to reduce human error, save time and cost, and increase speed of delivery. Assurance  provides new insights to ensure that business intent is directly transferred to the network,  and that it is delivering on what was intended for business operations.