ACI Advanced Monitoring and Troubleshooting

by Carlo Schmidt, Joseph Ristaino, Sadiq Memon

Description This expert guide and reference will help you confidently deploy, support, monitor, and troubleshoot ACI fabrics and components. It is also designed to help you prepare for your Cisco DCACIA (300-630) exam, earning Cisco Certified Specialist ACI Advanced Implementation certification and credit toward CCNP Data Center certification if you choose.

Authored by three leading Cisco ACI experts, it combines a solid conceptual foundation, in-depth technical knowledge, and practical techniques. It also contains proven features to help exam candidates prepare, including review questions in most chapters, and Key Topic icons highlighting concepts covered on the exam.

The authors thoroughly introduce ACI functions, components, policies, command-line interfaces, connectivity, fabric design, virtualisation and service integration, automation, orchestration, and more. Next, they introduce best practices for monitoring and management, including the use of faults, health scores, tools, the REST API, in-band and out-of-band management techniques, and monitoring protocols. Proven configurations are provided, with steps for verification. Finally, they present advanced forwarding and troubleshooting techniques for maximising ACI performance and value.

ACI Advanced Monitoring and Troubleshooting is an indispensable resource for every data centre architect, engineer, developer, network or virtualisation administrator, and operations team member working in ACI environments. Understand Cisco ACI core functions, components, and protocols Apply the ACI Policy-Based Object Model to develop overall application frameworks Use command-line interfaces to manage and monitor Cisco ACI systems Master proven options for ACI physical and logical fabric design Establish connectivity for compute, storage, and service devices, switches, and routers Gain visibility into virtualisation layers through VMM, and integrate hypervisors from multiple vendors Seamlessly integrate Layer 4 to Layer 7 services such as load balancing and firewalling Automate and orchestrate for fast deployment with the REST API, scripting, and Ansible Minimise downtime and maximise ROI through more effective monitoring and configuration Thoroughly master concepts and techniques for advanced ACI and VXLAN forwarding Build deep practical expertise for quickly troubleshooting critical events Gain quick visibility into traffic flows and streamline problem isolation with the ACI Visibility & Troubleshooting Tool Walk through multiple real-world troubleshooting scenarios step-by-step Forewords written by Yusuf Bhaiji, Director of Certifications, Cisco Systems; and Ronak Desai, VP of Engineering for the Data Center Networking Business Unit, Cisco Systems.