Beyond Visibility: The Age of Intelligent Assurance with Cisco

Is your network reliable? Answer the question with Cisco Network Assurance. Cisco’s vision for network assurance is to unify experiences across Catalyst, Meraki, and ThousandEyes platforms, building smarter, end-to-end capabilities. The goal is to provide a consistent troubleshooting experience for IT administrators, regardless of the Cisco networking solutions they employ. While acknowledging current differences in dashboard complexity, the company aims for simplicity at the core, leveraging popular features from each portfolio, like Meraki’s intuitive flows and ThousandEyes’ path visualization. This unification will eventually lead to a single, consistent assurance score that reflects network health across all platforms, even in hybrid environments.

Cisco’s assurance strategy involves a phased approach: baseline and detect, localize and diagnose, mitigate and remediate, and finally, predict and optimize. Significant investments are being made across all these stages, moving beyond mere visibility to provide actionable insights and intelligent remediation. Recent advancements include org-wide assurance visibility, a feature providing a quick, critical analysis of network health across hundreds or thousands of networks based on a dynamically changing proportional weighted average score. This score considers various network components like clients, devices, infrastructure, and applications (with data from ThousandEyes), allowing for quick identification of problematic areas and contextual drill-downs into specific network health details.

Further enhancements include detailed client visibility, allowing administrators to troubleshoot specific client issues in real-time or historically, identifying connection paths, problems (e.g., DHCP server not responding), and suggested resolutions. The platform leverages root cause analysis frameworks that incorporate knowledge base articles and best practices to guide remediation. Customizable alert profiles help prevent alert fatigue by allowing organizations to set thresholds matching their SLAs. Looking ahead, Cisco is integrating an AI assistant that will enable faster troubleshooting by intelligently processing queries and suggesting actions, streamlining the entire assurance workflow. This AI assistant, along with ongoing improvements to the underlying assurance framework, aims to provide comprehensive and intelligent network management.