Introduction to ACIOps

ACIOps is a comprehensive management tool designed specifically for Day 2 operations of Cisco ACI environments. It empowers infrastructure teams to monitor and configure any object within their ACI deployment with precision and ease.

A key feature of ACIOps is its capability to capture infrastructure state both before and after significant events, offering valuable insights into operational changes. This state represents the output of specific CLI commands executed at these critical times, providing a clear, before-and-after comparison of the network’s condition. With this functionality, infrastructure operators gain a detailed understanding of the impact of events, faults, or failures on their network, helping them diagnose issues quickly and maintain operational integrity.

By delivering robust monitoring, configurational flexibility, and insightful state comparison, ACIOps is an essential tool for ensuring Cisco ACI environments operate smoothly and efficiently.

If you’re looking to get started check out the complete installation , otherwise, let’s take a look at ACIOps key features.

Key Features

• Infrastructure Monitoring:
  In Cisco ACI, all objects are organized within containers known as classes. These classes encompass the entire range of ACI elements, including configurations, interface states, routing tables, fault information, fabric health metrics, and more. Essentially, any aspect of Cisco ACI can be accessed and managed through its respective class.

ACIOps enables comprehensive access to these classes, allowing for in-depth monitoring across the infrastructure. With ACIOps, users can set up alerts to be notified whenever a specific parameter within a class changes, crosses a defined threshold, or is missing. This real-time monitoring and alerting capability provides operators with immediate insight into important shifts within the network environment, helping to ensure prompt response and operational continuity.

By offering extensive visibility and control over ACI classes, ACIOps enhances infrastructure oversight, enabling proactive management and rapid troubleshooting to maintain optimal network performance.

• Capture Infrastructure State: One of the greatest challenges during an incident is understanding what went wrong, where it occurred, and how it may have impacted the infrastructure. ACIOps addresses this by significantly reducing troubleshooting time, providing immediate access to critical information as soon as a fault arises.

But ACIOps goes beyond basic fault detection. Its standout feature is the ability to capture and compare the infrastructure’s state both before and after an incident, offering unparalleled insight into changes that may have triggered or resulted from the fault. For example, if a fault affects an L3OUT, dynamic routes could be impacted, potentially disrupting connectivity. With ACIOps, you can define specific commands to capture relevant data before a fault occurs, with the same output captured afterward—essentially giving you the ability to look into the past, view the present, and make informed comparisons.

This allows you to capture the precise state of routing tables, interface statuses, and other critical CLI command outputs, all of which help operators swiftly pinpoint and resolve issues.

This capability facilitates a thorough, data-driven approach to troubleshooting, minimizing downtime and accelerating recovery. By delivering this comprehensive perspective, ACIOps empowers infrastructure teams to address incidents effectively, enhancing network resilience and operational efficiency.

• Fabric Configuration Automation: ACIOps integrates seamlessly with Terraform to deploy and manage Cisco ACI configurations, creating a streamlined and consistent way to handle complex network setups as code. This integration enhances automation and scalability within the Cisco ACI Fabric. By defining ACI resources using Terraform’s declarative syntax, it becomes simple to version and replicate configurations across multiple environments, promoting a standardized approach to infrastructure management. This significantly reduces the risk of manual configuration errors and supports modular configurations, empowering network engineers and operators to efficiently scale ACI deployments or adapt to evolving requirements.

• AI Integration: ACIOps integrates with OpenAI to assist engineers in diagnosing fabric faults and providing insights on effective solutions. By leveraging AI-driven recommendations, engineers gain valuable context and actionable ideas to quickly address issues and maintain network stability.

Additionally, OpenAI is leveraged to assist in building ACI configurations, which can then be deployed on the infrastructure using Terraform.

Other Features Include

• • Contracts Inspector: Specify a source IP and destination IP to determine if a particular port is permitted between the specified EPGs. The Contracts Inspector provides visibility into all related contracts, subjects, and filters configured for the source and destination EPG combination. Additionally, it shows where these contracts are consumed and provided across other EPGs, offering a comprehensive view of access control configurations within the ACI environment.
• • Interface traffic Graph: Access historical and real-time traffic patterns across all interfaces in your infrastructure, all without the need for SNMP. This feature provides a comprehensive view of network performance, enabling proactive monitoring and analysis of interface traffic trends.
• • Dashboard: Access a centralized dashboard displaying all devices (controllers and switches) along with their operational status. This dashboard also provides a detailed view of faults per switch. The integration with OpenAI helps engineers analyze faults efficiently and receive AI-powered insights for resolving issues, enabling faster troubleshooting and enhanced network stability.