Cisco ACI/APIC extension

• Latest Dynatrace
• Extension
• Published Oct 27, 2025

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Overview

Cisco ACI/APIC extension uses Cisco APIC REST API to collect information about the network fabric managed by Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APIC).

The extension provides comprehensive visibility into the ACI Fabric and Tenants.

The extension collects performance metrics, health scores, and faults from ACI Fabric components, including leaf and spine nodes, controller cluster elements, and Layer 1 physical and Management interfaces. It also gathers information about Tenants and their Application Profiles, Private Networks, Bridge Domains, Contracts, and Endpoint Groups (EPGs).

Use cases

Requirements

Create a specific APIC user

For Dynatrace integration, we recommend creating a specific user with read-only privileges. Users can be defined locally on APIC or can be remotely authenticated, based on APIC login policies.

This is an example of crerating a locally authenticated user:

Compatibility information

Activation and setup

Details

The extension package contains

Summary of the monitored entities

The ACI extension metrics grouping (featureSets)

The following featureSets categorize various metrics collected by the Cisco ACI extension from the APIC controller:

Fabric interface metrics are aggregated over 5-minute intervals and reported at least once every 5 minutes. Tenant entity ingress and egress metrics are aggregated over 15-minute intervals and reported at least once every 15 minutes.

Faults reporting and event integration

The extension supports ingesting ACI Faults and reporting them as log messages and as Dynatrace events.

Note: Event generation applies only to faults that are already enabled for log message reporting.

Licensing and cost

There is no charge for obtaining the extension, only for the data that the extension ingests. The details of license consumption will depend on which licensing model you are using. This will either be Dynatrace classic licensing or the Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) model.

Metrics

License consumption is based on the number of metric data points ingested. The following formula will provide approximate annual data points ingested assuming all feature sets are enabled.

(
       10 (featureSet: fabric)
    +  8 * <Number of Fabric Pods> (featureSet: fabric)
    +  2 * <Number of Fabric Nodes> (featureSet: fabric)
    + (6 + 37) * <Number of leaf or spine Fabric Nodes> (featureSets: default and fabric)
    +  3 * <Number of controller Fabric Nodes> (featureSet: fabric)
    + (3 + 8) * <Number of Layer 1 Physical Interfaces with the traffic> (spines and leaves, featureSets: default and fabric-if-stats)
    + (1 + 3) * <Number of Layer 1 Physical Interfaces without the traffic> (spines and leaves, featureSets: default and fabric-if-stats)
    + (3 + 8) * <Number of Management Interfaces with the traffic> (spines and leaves, featureSets: default and fabric-if-stats)
    + (1 + 3) * <Number of Management Interfaces without the traffic> (spines and leaves, featureSets: default and fabric-if-stats)
    + (1 + 2) * <Number of Controller Physical Interfaces> (controllers, featureSet: fabric)
    + <Number of faults grouped by type, domain, severity and delegated flag> (featureSet: fabric)
    +  5 * <Number of Tenants> (featureSet: tenants)
    +  1 * <Number of Application Profiles> (featureSet: tenants)
    +  1 * <Number of Private Networks> (featureSet: tenants)
    +  1 * <Number of Bridge Domains> (featureSet: tenants)
    +  3 * <Number of EPGs> (featureSet: tenants)
    +  8 // Optional - Self monitoring metrics (featureSet: self-monitoring)
) * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days / <interval-default-5min> data points per year
+
(
      12 * <Number of Tenants> (featureSet: tenants-stats)
    + 12 * <Number of Application Profiles> (featureSet: tenants-stats)
    + 12 * <Number of Private Networks> (featureSet: tenants-stats)
    + 12 * <Number of Bridge Domains> (featureSet: tenants-stats)
    + 12 * <Number of EPGs> (featureSet: tenants-stats)
) * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days / 15 min data points per year

Logs

Key component of the license consumption formula is the log volume ingested. The following formula will provide approximate log volume ingested assuming an estimated size of a single log record equal 5000 bytes. Note that charges for log data retention and query will apply accordingly to your rate card. Also note that number of faults and fault records depends on your environment and may vary a lot.

(
   (
         <Number of Fabric Pods>
       + <Number of Fabric Nodes>
       + <Number of leaf or spine Fabric Nodes>
       + <Number of controller Fabric Nodes>
       + <Number of Layer 1 Physical Interfaces>
       + <Number of Management Interfaces>
       + <Number of Controller Physical Interfaces>
       + <Number of Tenants>
       + <Number of Application Profiles>
       + <Number of Private Networks>
       + <Number of Bridge Domains>
       + <Number of EPGs>
       + <Number of EPG Contract Providers>
       + <Number of EPG Contract Consumers>
       + <Number of relation between Bridge Domain and EPG>
   ) * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days / <interval-default-60min> log records per year
   +
   (
       + <Number of faults> (if configured to report faults as log records)
       + <Number of fault records> (if configured to report fault records as log records)
   ) log records
) * 0.000005 GiB log ingest per year

Classic licensing

In the classic licensing model, metric ingestion will consume Davis Data Units (DDUs) at the rate of .001 DDUs per metric data point. Multiply the above metric formula for annual data points by .001 to estimate annual DDU usage by metrics.

Logs ingestion will consume DDUs at the rate of .0005 DDU per log line. Use the annual amount of log lines calculated by the logs formula above to estimate logs DDU usage, using .0005 DDU multiplier instead of 0.000005 GiB per log-line.

FAQ

Feature sets

When activating your extension using monitoring configuration, you can limit monitoring to one of the feature sets. To work properly the extension has to collect at least one metric after the activation.

In highly segmented networks, feature sets can reflect the segments of your environment. Then, when you create a monitoring configuration, you can select a feature set and a corresponding ActiveGate group that can connect to this particular segment.

All metrics that aren't categorized into any feature set are considered to be the default and are always reported.

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