Cisco ACI/APIC extension

• Latest Dynatrace
• Extension
• Updated on Jun 15, 2026

Monitor Cisco ACI fabric, tenants, EPGs, and contracts for health, performance, and faults via the APIC REST API with topology insights.

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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 creating a locally authenticated user:

Create Local User

User Settings

Choose security domain

Add Role

Select Role

Choose Admin Role

Confirm Read Privilege

Add Security Domain

Confirm new 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 costs

There is no charge to use the extension. You are only charged for the data that the extension ingests.

The Cisco ACI/APIC extension ingests custom metrics, which consume Davis Data Units (DDUs) (Dynatrace classic license) or Metrics powered by Grail (DPS), according to your license model.

The extension ingests various metrics at 5-, 15-, and 60-minute intervals as described in the following code blocks. The calculations are approximate and assume that:

Metrics calculations:

  <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>
+ <Number of faults> (if configured to report faults as log records)
+ <Number of fault records> (if configured to report fault records as log records)

To calculate your hourly consumption, sum all metrics ingested at the various intervals:

([5-minute metrics] * 12) + ([15-minute metrics] * 4) + (60-minute metrics) = Metric data points per 60 minutes

Dynatrace Platform Subscription

In the Dynatrace Platform Subscription, metric ingestion consumes Metrics powered by Grail according to the number of ingested metric data points.

To calculate the approximate yearly consumption, apply the following calculation: <metric data points per 60 minutes> * 24 hours * 365 days.

For logs, regular consumption applies. See Log Analytics.

Dynatrace classic license

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

Logs ingestion consumes DDUs at the rate of .0005 DDU per log line. For logs, regular DDU consumption applies. See DDU consumption for Log Management and Analytics or DDUs for Log Monitoring Classic.

The DDU cost above does not include any possible log events or custom events that are triggered by the extension. For more information, see DDU events.

FAQ

Feature sets

When activating your extension using a 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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Monitor Cisco ACI fabric, tenants, EPGs, and contracts for health, performance, and faults via the APIC REST API with topology insights.