Proactive IT operations, incident automation and self-healing networks

Today marks another important milestone for Cisco's hybrid-cloud operations initiatives. We are very excited to announce the availability of new operations tools for Cisco Nexus Dashboard with our strategic partner ServiceNow: Nexus Dashboard Connector for ServiceNow and Cisco Cloud Network Insights App for the Now Platform.

This announcement comes on the heels of Cisco's unveiling of the Nexus Dashboard 2.1, a single pane of glass agile platform for full lifecycle multi-cloud networking automation and operations to deploy, operate and manage your infrastructure with ease. In Nexus Dashboard 2.1, we introduced open APIs and platform capabilities for 3rd party developers to build Apps and services on Nexus Dashboard, thereby giving our customers the choice and flexibility to seamlessly integrate with existing IT software tools in their multi-cloud networks.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard, along with Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator offers a rich suite of platform services, open REST APIs and Kafka subscription service for third-party developers to build custom applications and integrations. Leveraging these open APIs and platform services, we released out-of-the-box tools that unlock valuable use cases through integration with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).

Today, we are proud to congratulate our strategic technology partner, ServiceNow for the collaborative effort and highlight use cases these integrations unlock.

Network Service and Incident Management Advancements: Cisco Nexus Dashboard and ServiceNow

In monitoring service health, identifying service disruptions, and aiding problem resolution, cloud-based business service management solutions offer critical insights and control. When complex network problems arise, service management solutions need deeper insights into the intent of the network administrator to pinpoint, characterize, or resolve them. This resolution requires arduous investigation and troubleshooting. When the problem is identified and understood, network administrators need to create a ticket, resolve the problem, verify the fix, and close the ticket.

The Cisco Cloud Networking team and ServiceNow have a solid partnership that spans several years to deliver deep product integrations and solutions that help customers to address important service management challenges that include aligning their infrastructure to cater to critical business services, accelerating the network service delivery through approval-based workflow automation and adhering to SLAs through incident automation. These solutions span across Cisco ACI, NX-OS, Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator and Nexus Dashboard Insights' assurance capabilities.

The newest addition to Cisco-ServiceNow joint portfolio is the integration between Cisco Nexus Dashboard and the ServiceNow ITSM and ITOM solutions. The solution comprises of two new components -Cisco Cloud Network Insights App for the ServiceNow Platform and Nexus Dashboard Connector for ServiceNow, a plugin for Cisco Nexus Dashboard. IT operations teams can now automate the lifecycle of the incidents for Cisco Infrastructure and operations tools, as well as deliver their ServiceNow IT services from Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Cloud Network Insights App for ServiceNow enables customers to automate incident management and assignment for network anomalies and advisories, thereby helping network teams address potential network issues and prevent outages proactively.

The solution helps optimize network operations, by helping network operations teams:

• Rule-based network anomaly management: Manage a large number of machine-generated anomalies through automated ticketing with pre-defined rules
• Resource optimization: Optimize the staff and other critical resources through intelligent incident assignment and prioritization
• Incident tracking: Monitor incident trends using out-of-the box incident dashboards for anomalies and advisories as the heads-up display
• Rapid communication: Act quickly on the critical incidents with the alerts on their medium of choice (Emails, Webex Teams, Slack)
• Customized reporting: Create custom reports for the network anomalies to track and report the SLA adherence
• Accelerate troubleshooting: Accelerate the troubleshooting with the ability to cross-launch Cisco Nexus Dashboard with the context of the incident

With the introduction of ServiceNow Connector for Nexus Dashboard, we bring ServiceNow incident management capabilities to Nexus Dashboard that enable network operators to manage the lifecycle of their ServiceNow incidents, track the incident updates and deliver their service requests on Nexus Dashboard.

Together, Cisco Nexus Dashboard and ServiceNow help network operators identify, analyze, predict, and fix the issues, thereby enabling customers build self-healing networks.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard customers can download Cisco and ServiceNow certified tools from

Cisco DC App Center and ServiceNow Store

Support from Cisco TAC is available through Cisco Solutions Support

This is still the beginning of our journey. We will be adding newer capabilities to the ServiceNow solution that we announced today and will be expanding the Nexus Dashboard ecosystem across other categories such as Application delivery controllers (ADCs), alerting tools, Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and security management.

If you like to learn more about Cisco-ServiceNow joint solution capabilities, please visit the resources listed below or reach out to your Cisco or ServiceNow account teams.

Resources

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Developer Guide & API documentation (Cisco DevNet)

Cisco ND Insights -ServiceNow Integration ("Cisco Cloud Network Insights" for ServiceNow)

Cisco Nexus Dashboard -ServiceNow Integration

How to Automate, Monitor and Analyze your Data Center fabric in Real-Time (Webinar)

Hybrid Cloud Networks are Calling -Cisco Nexus Dashboard Has the Answer (Blog)