Cisco Catalyst Center (DNA Center) extension

Practical tests reveal the following rule of thumb: 1000 devices per each one minute monitoring interval.

This means that with a five-minute monitoring interval, it should be achievable to monitor 5000 devices with a single ActiveGate.

One monitoring configuration should track one Catalyst Center. Multiple monitoring configurations should be used to track multiple Catalyst Centers.

This is important to retain consistency in the Catalyst Center locations reporting. If you split a single Catalyst Center instance between more than one monitoring configuration, for example by using tag-based filters, you may end up with duplicate entities representing individual Catalyst Center locations. This results in double-counted metrics for these locations.

We recommend a one-minute monitoring interval to retain high data fidelity for alerting and Davis AI reasoning. In very large environments, increasing monitoring interval may help with scalability; this however is always occupied with data fidelity loss. We don't recommend going beyond five.

Please note that data on entities that do not change often. This data is already collected less frequently and you can adjust it further. For more information, see Discovery frequencies adjustment.

The Catalyst API returns negative values for non-reachable devices.

No, not all feature sets are required.

Yes, but with limitations. In the extension configuration, select the Cisco Catalyst Center Version that matches your installed version. If your exact version is not listed, choose the closest lower version available.

Please note that when connecting to versions of Cisco Catalyst Center other than those listed in Compatibility information, some metrics may be missing or unavailable. Specifically, older API versions are not reliable as a source of the interface-related metrics, due to API scalability limitations. Therefore, when extension is connected to DNA Center 2.3.6.x or DNA Center 2.3.5.x or earlier, there will be no interface-level metrics available on charts and in the Infrastructure & Operations. Other metrics gaps may also exist. We strongly recommend connecting to API versions listed in the Compatibility Information section.

This indicates that the Catalyst endpoint uses a self-signed certificate. If you trust the endpoint, you can skip certification verification. To do this, in the connection settings, set Check SSL Certificate to false.

If you need to use different HTTP proxy servers for different Catalyst endpoints, you should create a separate extension configuration for each proxy. The proxy defined in a configuration applies to all Catalyst endpoints within that configuration. To ensure that the correct proxy is used for each endpoint, define each proxy-endpoint pair in its own dedicated configuration.

Not yet.

We look forward to your feedback on the enhancements that would make this extension better fitted to your environment. Post your product idea in the Dynatrace community.

If you see RateLimitError messages, it means the extension is sending too many requests to the Catalyst Center, causing it to return RateLimitError and temporarily block connections from the extension. This leads to timeouts.

To troubleshoot:

This issue can be resolved in several ways. In some cases, applying just one of the following steps is sufficient, while in others a combination may be needed:

The Dynatrace entity instance limit for interfaces is 100,000.

If your Catalyst Center contains more than 100,000 interfaces, you may have reached the Dynatrace entity instance limit for Network Interface and Catalyst Interface entities.

To verify this, run the following DQL query:

timeseries entity_count_per_entity_type =
  sum(
    dt.sfm.server.monitored_entities.entity_count_per_entity_type,
    filter: in(dt.me_type_name, array("network:interface", "cisco_cc:interface"))
  ),
  by: { dt.me_type_name }
| fieldsAdd entity_count_per_entity_type.single_value = arrayLast(entity_count_per_entity_type)
| fields `entity type`=dt.me_type_name, `entity count`=entity_count_per_entity_type.single_value

If the value is greater than 100,000, contact Dynatrace Support and request an increase of the entity limit for network interfaces (network:interface) and Catalyst interfaces (cisco_cc:interface) to 2.4 million for your tenant.

Query consumption can be reduced in several ways:

Query consumption can be reduced in several ways:

This issue typically occurs because the Cisco DNA Center REST API bundle was not automatically upgraded, even though the platform itself was.

To resolve this issue, disable and then re-enable the Cisco DNA Center REST API bundle. This forces a refresh and restores access to the affected endpoints.

To troubleshoot the Catalyst endpoint itself and validate the REST API bundle: