Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Operations and Troubleshooting (DCACIO)

About This Course

This three-day ILT course is designed for Network Engineers who need to know how to operate and troubleshoot Data Center Network Infrastructure running Cisco ACI. This course will cover material from an Operations (Day 0/1/2/n) perspective, discussing best practices, caveats and common issues.

Incorporating the latest software, hardware, and techniques, this course dives deep into the wealth of management and troubleshooting capabilities in Cisco ACI. Students will practice on the whole range of operations tools, including configuration management, performance tracking, and troubleshooting. Lots of troubleshooting. On Day 3 the instructor will inject various faults into the lab fabric, and students will need to apply the lessons of this course to resolve the issues in a live Challenge Lab.

The curriculum is delivered as Just-In-Time learning, designed to provide Engineers just what they need to know, just when they need to know it. This is production-focused training, based on battle-tested lessons learned from over 100 production deployments.

Audience Profile

This course is for Network Engineers and support teams who need to support a Cisco ACI data center network.

At Course Completion

After completion of this course, students will be able to...

• Operationalize and troubleshoot the ACI Fabric 
• Understand APIC and its monitoring, management and troubleshooting capabilities
• Avoid common mistakes and recognize common symptoms

Prerequisites

• ACI Field Engineer Essentials
  • ACI Field Engineer Implementation
  • Configuring Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches in ACI Mode
  • Or equivalent ACI experience
  • Familiarity with Data Center infrastructure operations
• Familiarity with management of Cisco DC switches
• Understanding of basic network troubleshooting 

Course Outline

Module 1: ACI Overview

• Cisco ACI Review
• Configuration Review

Module 2: ACI Configuration Management 

Installation Checklist

• HW Installation and Fabric Discovery
• LAB 1: Create admin-level user account
• ACI Firmware Upgrades
• Import / Export
• Configuration Snapshots and Rollbacks
• ACI Fabric Rebuild or Recovery
• Cluster Management
• Convert NXOS-mode to ACI-mode

LAB 2: Configuration Restore

Module 3: APIC Management Access Protocols and Interfaces

• APIC Management Access Protocols
• APIC Interfaces
• APIC Basic GUI
• Exercise: APIC Basic GUI
• Visore
• Exercise: Using Visore in APIC
• CLI
• Exercise: CLI Show Commands
• Exercise: CLI moquery Commands

Module 4: Monitoring ACI

• ACI Operation Always-On Tools
• Health Scores
• Faults in ACI
• Viewing Events and Logs
• Exercise: Viewing Audit Logs
• Syslog
• LAB 3: Configuring Syslog
• SNMP
• LAB 4: Configuring SNMP
• Monitoring Policies
• LAB 5: Custom Monitoring Policy
• Operations Tab Tools
• Exercise: Traffic Map
• Monitoring using CLI
• GITHUB Tools

Module 5: Troubleshooting ACI

• Troubleshooting Methodology
• Troubleshooting Tools
• Exercise: Create Taboo Contract
• Exercise: iPing
• Exercise: End Point Tracker
• Exercise: Configure Visibility & Troubleshooting Session
• Exercise: Viewing Contract Drops
• Exercise: Viewing Contracts
• Exercise: Traceroute
• Exercise: Atomic Counters
• LAB 6: SPAN
• Troubleshooting Fabric Installation & Discovery
• Troubleshooting Access Ports
• Troubleshooting Unicast Data Plane Forwarding
• Troubleshooting Endpoint Connectivity
• Troubleshooting VMM
• Identify Hardware Failure

LAB 10: Break Lab
LAB 11: Challenge Lab