The key components of Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller are shown in the left panel of the Cisco NDFC Graphical User Interface in Figure 7-7.
Figure 7-7 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller Dashboard View
The intent of the Dashboard is to enable network and storage administrators to focus on particular areas of concern around the health and performance of data center switching. This information is provided as 24-hour snapshots. The functional view of LAN switching consists of seven dynamic dashlets that display information in the context of the selected scope by default.
The following are the default dashlets that appear in the Overview dashboard window:
Fabric Health — Displays the fabric health summary of problems, and number in the donut depicting total number of fabrics. Displays fabric health status with Critical, and Healthy.
Events Analytics — Displays events with Critical, Error, and Warning severity.
Switches Configuration — Displays the switches inventory summary information such as the switch models and the corresponding count. It also displays the synchronization status of the switch configurations as compared to the intent defined in Cisco NDFC.
Switch Health — Displays the switches health summary Critical, and Healthy with the corresponding count.
Switch Roles — Displays the switches roles summary and the corresponding count. Displays the number of access, spine and leaf devices.
Switch Hardware Version — Displays the switches models and the corresponding count.
Switch Software Version — Displays the switches software version and the corresponding count.
Reports — Displays switch reports.
The Topology window displays color-encoded nodes and links that correspond to various network elements, including switches, links, fabric extenders, port-channel configurations, virtual port-channels, and more.
Figure 7-8 shows the Cisco NDFC Topology view.
Figure 7-8 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller Topology View
Figure 7-9 shows the expanded form of the Cisco NDFC Main Menu for LAN deployments.
Figure 7-9 Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller Main Menu for LAN deployments
Fabrics tab displays the fabric name, fabric technology based on the fabric template, fabric type – Switch Fabric, LAN Monitor or External, along with ASN for the fabric and fabric health. From the Fabrics tab, you can create, edit and delete fabric also. In the Switches tab, you can verify the current switches details including name, IP address, serial no., associated fabric, config status – In-Sync or Out-of-sync, model no. etc. From the Switches tab, you can add switches to the fabric and deploy configuration to the switches, assign various switch role – spine, leaf, edge router, border gateway etc. The Interfaces tab displays all the interfaces that are discovered for the switch, Virtual Port Channels (vPCs), and intended interfaces missing on the device. You can create, deploy, view, edit and delete various interface configurations from this tab including port channel, vPC, loopback, subinterface, etc. In the Services tab, you can add, edit, delete various services nodes such as Firewall, Load Balancer and Virtual Networking Function (VNF).
From the Virtual Infrastructure Manager tab, you can add, edit, delete and rediscover virtual infrastructure manager instances such as vCenter, Kubernetes Cluster, OpenStack Cluster.
Server Settings tab allows you to set the parameters of the NDFC server from the Cisco NDFC Web UI. Server settings are classified under different tabs, such as Alarms, Events, SNMP, etc. Feature management tab allows you to dynamically enable feature sets belonging to different personas such as Kubernetes Visualizer, Endpoint Locator, etc. LAN Credentials Management tab allows you to configure two sets of credentials:
Discovery Credentials—Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller uses these credentials during discovery and periodic polling of the devices. NDFC use discovery credentials with SSH and SNMPv3 to discover hardware or software inventory from the switches. Therefore, these are called as discovery credentials. You can discover one inventory per switch. These are read-only and cannot make configuration changes on the switches.
Configuration Change Credentials—Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller uses these credentials when user tries to use the features that change the device configuration.
Event Analytics tab displays the alarms that are generated for various categories. This tab displays information such as ID (optional), Severity, Failure Source, Name, Category, Acknowledged, Creation Time, Last Updated (optional), Policy, and Message. You can specify the Refresh Interval in this tab. You can select one or more alarms and then acknowledge or unacknowledge their status using the Change Status drop-down list. From Image management tab, you can automate the steps associated with upgrade planning, scheduling, downloading, and monitoring the devices. Image management is supported only for Cisco Nexus switches.