Much of the discussion about Cisco ACI has been about accelerating the deployment of applications across infrastructure -defined by application needs and driven by policy.  There is another powerful benefit from ACI for the datacenter network administrators of today who are stretched thin trying to debug outages or respond to concerns about poor application performance. For all of them, the latest release of ACI software, Brahmaputra or APIC 1.1(1j) and NX-OS 11.1(1j), provides exciting new enhancements for managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting data center infrastructure.

ACI's Brahmaputra release adds significant operations support in the form of:

• Pro-active tooling: ACI tools such as iTraceroute, iPing, health scores and atomic counters work to eliminate downtime. Users can work before issues become user detectable to identify and resolve issues. Configurations can be validated prior to deployment.
• Re-active tooling: When issues do occur in a production datacenter, users need to have the right tools available to resolve them.

For the ACI engineering and product team extensive software release notes, go to these links

APIC 1.1 and NX-OS R 11.1.

During Cisco Live San Diego, there were a number of sessions covering these new capabilities to address "what can ACI do for me today?". The answer is directly addressed by the benefits centralized management, monitoring and troubleshooting can deliver when you view and operate the entire fabric as a single system.

If you need help dealing with the complexity of  today's non-application centric data centers,  I recommend that you take in the following Cisco Live sessions that highlight the simplified troubleshooting and centralized operational benefits of ACI which network operations teams can benefit from immediately, improving their productivity and speeding up remediation for application problems.

BRCACI-2102 ACI Troubleshooting

BRKACI-1502 Simplify Operations with ACI

PSODCT-2455 Simplify Day 0, 1, and 2 Operations in Application Centric Data Centers