Introduction

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is a central management console for multiple data center sites and a common platform for hosting Cisco data center operation applications, such as Nexus Dashboard Insights and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator. These applications are universally available for all the data center sites and provide real time analytics, visibility, and assurance for network policies and operations. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator can also run on Nexus Dashboard as a hosted app.

Nexus Dashboard provides a common platform and modern technology stack for these micro-services-based applications, simplifying the life cycle management of the different modern applications and reducing the operational overhead to run and maintain these applications. It also provides a central integration point for external 3rd party applications with the locally hosted applications.

Nexus Dashboard API

The Nexus Dashboard REST API is a programmatic interface that uses REST architecture. The API accepts and returns HTTP or HTTPS messages that contain JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) payloads. You can use any programming language to generate the messages and the JSON that contain the API methods or Managed Object (MO) descriptions.

The REST API is also used by the GUIs of the Nexus Dashboard and the services running on it. So that whenever information is displayed, it is read through the REST API; and when configuration changes are made, they are written through the REST API.

Nexus Dashboard Insights

Nexus Dashboard Insights service allows you to manage, maintain, and troubleshoot your networks effectively, to have a deep understanding of a network’s constituents and their properties, what the network is doing, how it is being used, how it is responding to the demands on it and most importantly how it will respond to new loads arising due to new business processes. As changes occur in the control plane, data plane, and forwarding plane of a network, the Insights service can detect, locate and root cause anomalies as close to real time as possible. Proactive notification of known vulnerabilities that may produce suboptimal behavior of the products is very critical. Timely detection and reduction of human errors can help minimize the operational and financial impact associated with network downtime.

The Nexus Dashboard Insights API incorporates a set of alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to provide deep insights into the behavior of the network by utilizing telemetry data obtained from networking and compute components. It can also automate troubleshooting, help rapid root-causing, and early remediation.

All supported APIs are available from the navigation menu on the left; for the full list of changes, see API Changelog.

Compatiblity

Not every version of a Nexus Dashboard service is supported on every version of the Nexus Dashboard platform. The following two tools provide full compatibility information related to the specific combinations of services' releases and platform releases as well as available co-hosting use cases: