Cisco Nexus Dashboard Reviews

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is managing Nexus 9K for a customer environment.

A specific example of what I manage through Cisco Nexus Dashboard day-to-day is the multi-site fabric, pushing configs such as adding new VRFs and VLANs.

Using Cisco Nexus Dashboard has changed the way I roll out deployments by simplifying multi-site management because I can push to different data centers simultaneously.

The best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers include automation at a high level for Nexus spine-and-leaf architecture.

That high-level automation helps my team tremendously in the day-to-day management of Nexus fabric by saving time.

I am specifically interested to see Hypershield and integration with Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard has impacted my organization positively, particularly for customers.

For our customers, I have seen specific outcomes such as faster changes, and software versions continue to improve as we move to version 4.3.

Customers save significant time when rolling out a change across multiple data centers; for example, a six-hour change requiring configuration of approximately twenty Nexus 9K devices can be completed in less than an hour by deploying the config.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard can be improved by having fewer bugs and fewer vulnerabilities, and regarding multicast functionality.

The operational trade-offs I have encountered when managing micro-segmentation policies and role-based access control across multi-site fabrics through Cisco Nexus Dashboard represent areas for improvement; rather than going with individual ACLs, I would prefer something similar to Hypershield for automated micro-segmentation.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for approximately three years.

I would say Cisco Nexus Dashboard is sixty percent stable.

Upgrade processes are always complex with Cisco NDFC, and transitioning from one version to another is too time-consuming and requires coordination.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is scalable to a good level.

Customer support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution; this tool is primarily used to manage Nexus or Cisco products.

The time saved is significant, but I cannot disclose additional details.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard overall as a seven.

I rate it seven because there is still room for improvements; however, I have an automated tool from Cisco to manage Nexus 9K.

Regarding Cisco Nexus Dashboard's AI capabilities, I am new to the security portion of NDFC AI.

I am mainly referring to governance policies when discussing access controls, data protection, or governance policies.

When it comes to AI output, some manual intervention is needed, especially when changes are made to the environment.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is deployed in my organization on-premises.

My operations teams coordinate firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard through manual coordination.

My teams have operationalized the AI-assisted predictive analytics and anomaly detection features in Cisco Nexus Dashboard for daily capacity planning and root cause analysis, though I cannot provide extensive details due to the criticality and privacy of my customers' environments.

No adjustments were needed in Cisco Nexus Dashboard to support those workloads.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that it is the only tool available from Cisco's platform for Nexus switches, but I am mostly interested in the next phase of NDFC with hyper-scale capabilities.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is primarily used for analytics on ACI. For upgrades, we perform them more as standalone operations on individual nodes rather than through coordinated firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

I should verify whether AI features are available within Cisco Nexus Dashboard and if they are included as a standard license.

The feature of Cisco Nexus Dashboard that I value most is the troubleshooting capability, which is our main use case.

We were running with single points of failure on a couple of leaf nodes and endpoints, and I gained good insight from Cisco Nexus Dashboard. While we have access to ACI where we can check independently, Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides us with better overall telemetry.

Operational trade-offs when managing micro-segmentation policies and role-based access control across multi-site fabrics through Cisco Nexus Dashboard is something we have yet to develop. Currently, we have things spread out across ICE, ACI, and different identities that we use. We would prefer to have one identity and integrate across end-to-end, but it does not seem to be that straightforward. We will need to first address segmentation before we can pursue this option, so this may be on our horizon in approximately a year.

At this point, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is either functional or non-functional for us. If it incorporated more security products, then it could serve as a single point of dashboard that we could use.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for around three years.

I assess Cisco Nexus Dashboard as stable and reliable. There has been no downtime.

I do not think we will need to scale Cisco Nexus Dashboard because our ACI environment is sufficient for us at this point.

I have used the customer service and technical support, and they were adequate. I would rate them on a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, as seven or eight.

Prior to adopting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, we were using another solution that was more of a network performance monitoring platform rather than this one because it provides all products rather than just this.

I would describe my experience deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard as follows: we received it ready-made, so I did not really do anything initially. However, we upgraded it, and the process was smooth with no issues encountered. Operation-wise, the experience was acceptable.

We managed the transition of configuration state and operational tooling when consolidating disparate data center management utilities into a single Cisco Nexus Dashboard cluster through an integrator when we installed our new big leaf and spine. It was a ready-made solution for us, and we did not implement it ourselves.

If I had to purchase Cisco Nexus Dashboard independently, I would not necessarily do so because it was part of a bundle, and we are using it. That is the reality of our situation.

I think the pricing, setup, and licensing for Cisco Nexus Dashboard were handled as a bundle. It has been in place for a couple of years, and then we will revisit.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard overall as a six or seven. I would say a six because it does not give me the flexibility to check other vendors.

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard involves using NDFC fabric. We have onboarded an EVPN VXLAN based NDFC fabric, and we use Cisco Nexus Dashboard to monitor switch performance, connectivity, topology, and configure policies.

Using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for monitoring and configuring policies helps my team on a daily basis because we use template-based deployment, making it easy to follow the same template for similar kinds of deployment. This speeds up the process, is efficient, and reduces the chance of getting an error.

We coordinate firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard by taking a maintenance window where we update the devices. We do not maintain much policy on the ACI itself. It is mainly version upgrades, software updates, or any other patching required that we do in a maintenance window when we get an outage approved by the customer.

We don't do micro-segmentation on Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

We haven't operationalized the AI-assisted predictive analytics and anomaly detection features within Cisco Nexus Dashboard for daily capacity planning and root cause analysis yet; that is in the pipeline.

The best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers are template-based deployment and extensive automation capabilities.

Regarding Cisco Nexus Dashboard's AI capabilities, its accuracy and reliability of output have met my expectations.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard has positively impacted my organization by improving customer experience and resiliency. Because we do template-based deployment and have high visibility on the products, it has improved performance for the workload that we host for our customers, and downtime has been low.

In terms of specific outcomes related to improved customer experience or reduced downtime, the number of Severity 1 incidents we had due to network unavailability has reduced significantly. We experience far fewer Severity 1 and Severity 2 network-related incidents since the Cisco Nexus Dashboard deployment.

I think Cisco Nexus Dashboard could be improved if I could see it onboard some of the other switching capabilities so we have a central pane of glass to monitor all the different kinds of Cisco devices we manage. I would also appreciate the possibility to onboard some third-party devices.

Regarding needed improvements, it would be beneficial if Cisco Nexus Dashboard comes with out-of-band support integrated with the deployment because the pain point is that we have to deploy an out-of-band network before we can start provisioning the actual device. If that capability were integrated, I wouldn't have to build a separate out-of-band network before provisioning Cisco Nexus Dashboard-based network. That would be helpful.

Some of the features, such as the user experience and graphical user interface for Cisco Nexus Dashboard, can be improved. Sometimes I find it difficult to navigate and find a specific feature. Even if I want to put a route policy on a device, I have to do quite a bit of clicking to figure out where I need to go to find that feature. There is room for improvement in the graphical user interface perspective to make it easier for users to find features.

Regarding Cisco Nexus Dashboard's AI capabilities, I think we need to have guardrails in place, and the guardrails should be deployed based on organizational policy. If there is a way to provision guardrails that the AI capability of Cisco Nexus Dashboard follows those policies and boundaries, that would be valuable. In that way, we can govern it while maintaining the security posture approved by the organization.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for about a year.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, specifically in terms of time saved. My team has saved roughly 30% of our time since using Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

My advice for others looking into using Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to go for it. It is a centrally managed platform that is good for visibility, automation, and template-based deployment.

My main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is automation. A specific example of a workflow I automate with Cisco Nexus Dashboard is creating a VRF and a VLAN associated with that VRF.

This workflow functions effectively for my team on a day-to-day basis as it requires only a screen click and deploy. Previously, my team had to manage a thousand lines of command lines in configuration, which is prone to human error.

In addition to my main use case, upgrading software iOS is very fast as well.

The best features Cisco Nexus Dashboard offers are mainly all GUI based, which is beneficial for junior network engineers, and at the same time, automation capabilities such as click to deploy a VLAN.

The GUI and click to deploy automation have reduced half of the resource time of the network, allowing my team to accomplish more work. Since Cisco Nexus Dashboard was newly deployed, I haven't really seen all the benefits yet.

Looking ahead, I am watching specific outcomes or metrics such as deployment time, configuration errors, and team capacity. I am looking to automate how the monitoring works for Cisco Nexus Dashboard, particularly if it is easy to monitor the switches inside Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard could be improved in terms of the flexibility of using the CLI and the GUI because there are instances where it becomes unsynced due to CLI configurations that someone made separately.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for less than a year.

I rate Cisco Nexus Dashboard a seven out of ten. I give Cisco Nexus Dashboard a seven out of ten because my current operation usage of the product is less than a year, so I cannot really make any recommendation.

There is no current policy in regards to coordinating firmware upgrades, maintenance windows, and policy synchronization across disparate ACI fabrics and NX-OS environments using Cisco Nexus Dashboard. However, I need to think about how to deploy or process the changes that I plan inside Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to plan ahead.