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 Orchestrator

Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator provides consistent network and policy orchestration, scalability, and disaster recovery across multiple data centers through a single pane of glass while allowing the data center to go wherever the data is.

Using the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator API, you can interconnect separate Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco Cloud ACI, and Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) sites, each managed by its own controller and configure the policy across them from the single location.

The API also provides policy management, monitoring the health of the interconnected fabrics, and enforcement of segmentation and security policies.

The main benefits of using the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator API include:

  • Single pane of glass for administration and orchestration of multiple networking fabrics for both Cisco ACI and DCNM
  • Automation of the configuration and management of intersite network interconnects across an IP backbone for both Cisco ACI and DCNM
  • Consistent multitenant policy across multiple sites, which allows IP mobility, disaster recovery, and active/active use cases for data centers
  • Capability to map tenants, applications, and associated networks to specific availability domains within the Cisco Multi-Site architecture for both Cisco ACI and DCNM
  • Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud orchestration supporting on-premises Cisco ACI sites and public cloud sites, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure
  • Ability to scale out sites and leaf switches based on resource growth

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: