The importance of an intelligent network controller

The importance of an intelligent
network controller

What is Cisco DNA Center?

Cisco DNA Center is a powerful network controller and management dashboard that lets you take charge of your network, optimize your Cisco investment, secure your hybrid workforce, and lower your IT spending. Full automation capabilities for provisioning and change management are enhanced with AI/ML-enriched analytics that pull streaming telemetry from everywhere in the network. Applications, services, and users are prioritized based on business goals, within policy parameters and security best practices.

Network, application, or device performance shortcomings are flagged, and instant remediation guidance is offered, saving hours of IT troubleshooting. Additionally, machine reasoning automates complex networking tasks with the click of a button, to enable your newer administrators and save time for your seasoned engineers.

This interconnection of automation and assurance forms a continuous validation and verification loop, checking alignment of network operation with business intent. Through open APIs and SDKs, third-party technologies can be run on top of Cisco DNA Center and benefit from its powerful network visibility. Cisco DNA Center is an open, extensible platform for streamlining IT workflows and achieving greater business innovation.

What is vManage?

In much the same way that Cisco DNA Center manages switching, wireless, and routing, Cisco vManage provides a centralized means
to manage Cisco SD-WAN devices efficiently.

Cisco vManage is a highly visualized management dashboard that enables the orchestration and management of SD-WAN resources and provides the tools to centrally monitor and simplify network operations. Through the vManage dashboard, network administrators can quickly establish an SD-WAN overlay fabric to connect data centers, branches, campuses, colocation facilities, and hybrid workforce to improve network speed, security, and efficiency. Other key capabilities include:

Performing authentication, authorization, provisioning, and upgrading of all elements deployed in the network
Providing information regarding component-to-component connectivity
A centralized policy engine to implement policies and connectivity (routing information, access control, segmentation, fallback/failover, extranets, and service chaining) across the SD-WAN fabric
Providing policy constructs to manage SD-WAN resources regardless of location
Orchestrating scalable and consistent unified communications configurations across the entire enterprise via templates
Providing visibility into network or application performance

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Additionally, vManage boasts two new integrations:

Cisco ThousandEyes extends visibility into the internet, cloud, and SaaS. You can quickly pinpoint the source of issues, get to resolution faster, and manage the performance of what matters
Cisco Umbrella accelerates the transition to a SASE architecture; you can quickly connect, monitor, and protect all company data centers, core and campus locations, branches, colocation facilities, cloud infrastructure, and
remote workers