In simple definition, Cisco DNA Center is a powerful network controller and management dashboard that lets you take charge of your network, optimize your Cisco investment, and lower your IT spending. Just like Cisco ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) is Cisco’s management platform for data centers, Cisco DNA Center is Cisco’s management platform for enterprise Networks. It is Cisco’s architecture for enterprise networks – across the campus, branch, WAN, and extended enterprise. 

It is an appliance that we can be installed on our networks locally or choosing the option to have it in the cloud, it provides a graphical and programming interface to design your network; to add devices, configure devices, monitor and troubleshoot devices on the network. Cisco in the past has had other graphical frontends to router configuration such as Cisco configuration professional but the Cisco DNA center is way beyond that in terms of scope and capabilities.

It is a network management system that can automate the deployment, connectivity, and lifecycle of your infrastructure and proactively maintain the quality and security of your applications, so that your IT staff can focus on networking projects that enhance your core business.

With Cisco DNA Center, the days of time-consuming network provisioning and tedious troubleshooting tasks are over. Plug-and-Play (PnP) deployment and Software Image Management (SWIM) features reduce device installation and upgrade times from hours to minutes and bring new remote offices online with plug-and-play ease from an off-the-shelf Cisco^® devices.

Area of focus for Cisco DNA center

1. Design – With design, we can take the map of the world and add an area, and within that area, we can have a building, we can have another area within an area, we can put a floor and even import a floor plan, we can drag and drop devices unto the floor plan, we can define what IP addresses are for the areas, it is just a way for us to design our networks through this graphical interface.
2. Policy -Cisco DNA center can also apply policy; we can assign policies to an entire group allowing or denying them access to something, w can do ip based access control, in quality of service, we can set up a queue profile defining what bandwidth amount are giving to different applications.
3. Provision -Here, we can essentially do plug and play for our devices and have a new network device sent to whatever location where its going to be installed, have someone there plug it in and when the device boots up, its going to go out and get some ip addresses from the DHCP server, including some DNS server information and it will resolve the Ip address of the DNA central server and it’s going to go up to that server and based on it’s serial number, it will be able to download a configuration file. So, we pretty much had zero touch on getting the device installed, we just setup the profile of the device within DNA center, send it out and have someone plug it in and boom, the device installs itself.
4. Assurance– This is where the health of the network is monitored, helps with troubleshooting and if there is existing faults, we can see what those are and based on the experience of Cisco Tech, the DNA center will give us feedback about what needs to be done to resolve this issue. It has a path trace tool in built, you can do a ping, telnet session between the 2 devices especially if you cannot get from point A to point B on the network and lets say, there is an access control list blocking that traffic, DNA center will give a graphical representation of the network and show us exactly the ACL that’s blocking our traffic. Another typical scenario is that users say things like “last Tuesday at 3 p.m. I wasn’t able to get on the wireless network.” In a traditional network, if someone says she had an issue last week, there isn’t much that can be done about it. However, Cisco DNA Center Assurance has Network Time Travel, and it is as cool as it sounds. Network Time Travel acts as a digital video recorder (DVR) for the network. But rather than recording television and enabling the user to play back shows at a later time, Network Time Travel records what is going on in the environment using streaming telemetry and can play back something that happened in the past. It also can show how the network is performing now as well as use things such as sensors to provide predictive analytics on how the network will perform in the future.
5. Platform– One of the most powerful capabilities of the Cisco DNA center is its ability to act as a programming platform, it has a large collection of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that will allow us to do via program what we can do graphically; if we want to provision or set a policy, gather troubleshooting information, we can do that with a program, with a python scrip for example using some of the APIs.