Exploring NDFC Dashboard and Topology

Hello. My name is Tomas Klanschink. I'm a Cisco data center network subject matter expert with the Cisco technical education team. In this video, we will explore Nexus dashboard fabric controller, dashboard, and topology. You will begin with checking fabric health. Then you will check switch health and performance. And you will finish with checking the topology tab and its features. Let's look at an example where you have implemented a VXLAN EVPN fabric called fabric with two spine and two leaf switches in your environment. Your first task is to check the fabric health and any possible errors in the fabric. Then you will verify switch configuration and check switch health, roles, and switch hardware and software versions. You will check topology tab to see architectural layouts of your fabric. In the end, you will check operation and configuration tab and device color coding. Open and log in to NexSys dashboard fabric controller. From the left menu bar, choose dashboard. The overview window displays the default dashlets. Fabric health displays the fabric health summary of problems and number in the donut depicting total number of fabrics. In this example, there is one fabric deployed and in fabric health status, you can see the fabric has minor alarms raised. Event analytics displays events with critical error and warning severity. In this example, you can see four hundred and two minor errors. Switches configuration displays the switches inventory summary and the corresponding count. In this example, you can see four switches, all of them in sync. Click on in sync. A switches pane opens where you can see that leaf one, leaf two, spine one, and spine two in fabric are all in sync in this example. Click dashboard and scroll down. Switch help displays the switches health summary with the corresponding count. In this example, all four switches have minor errors. Switch roles displays the switches roles summary and the corresponding count. In this example, there are two spine and two leaf switch roles. Switch hardware version displays the switches models and the corresponding count. In this example, there are four virtual nexus nine k v switches. Switch software version displays the switches software version and the corresponding count. You can see that in this example, all four switches run on the same software version. Click topology. Click fabric once. A slide in pane appears from the right that displays more information about the fabric, such as health, alarms, fabric info, and inventory. Close the slide in pane. Now double click fabric. You can see the topology of fabric, in this example two spine and two leaf switches. You can also see that one VRF and one network are created so far. Double click networks to see that network name is VLAN one hundred in this example. Right click the network and choose edit network. In this example, the network is a member of v r f, my v r f fifty thousand. Click close and click fabric. Click on spine one to display the configured switch name, IP address, switch model, and other summary information such as connectivity status, serial number, health, last polled CPU utilization, and last polled memory utilization in the switch slide in pane. Close the slide in pane. Click the actions drop down list to perform various actions based on the element you select in the topology. In the fabric topology view, many options are available in the drop down list. Detailed view, edit fabric, add switches, recalculate and deploy, and more. To perform actions on the elements in the topology other than the ones listed in the actions drop down list, right click the element. In this example, right click spine one. You can see additional options such as discovery, set role, manage interfaces, manage policies, VPC pairing, and more. You can also filter by attributes in topology pane. For the purpose of this video, choose switch role, select contains, write leaf, and press enter. Only the two leaf switches are visible in the topology. All the other elements are grayed out. Click x to remove the filter. In the view pane, press plus to zoom in, minus to zoom out. You can also adjust the layout to fit the screen. You can also refresh the topology or save any changes to the topology. You can view the logical links using the show logical links toggle switch. Use operation button to see switch held status. In this example, all four switches are with minor errors. You can see the possible colors and what each color indicate in the view pane. Click configuration to see the switch's configuration status. In this example, all four switches are green, meaning in sync. The topology supports different layouts along with the save layout option that remembers how you positioned your topology. Click hierarchical to provide an aligned architectural view of your topology. Click hierarchical left right to get similar view but this time from left to right. Click circular to draw nodes in a circular or concentric circular pattern. Click hierarchical layout again, and now drag spine one and spine two around, and then click on the save topology layout button to retain the positions. Click random that nodes are placed randomly on the window. Nexus dashboard fabric controller tries to intelligently place nodes that belong together in close proximity. Now choose custom saved for the Nexus dashboard fabric controller to draw the nodes based on your last saved layout position. This concludes the Cisco technical education video on exploring Cisco Nexus dashboard fabric controller dashboard and topology. Thank you for watching.