Visibility into application traffic has traditionally been important for infrastructure operations to maintain security, troubleshooting, and compliance and perform resource planning. With the technological advances and growth in cloud-based applications, it has become imperative to gain increased visibility into the network traffic. Traditional approaches to gain visibility into network traffic are expensive and rigid, making it difficult for managers of large-scale deployments.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker with Cisco Nexus Switches provides a software-defined, programmable solution to aggregate copies of network traffic using Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) or network Test Access Point (TAP) for monitoring and visibility. As opposed to traditional network taps and monitoring solutions, this packet-brokering approach offers a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution that is well-suited for customers who need to monitor higher-volume and business-critical traffic for efficient use of security, compliance, and application performance monitoring tools.

With the flexibility to use a variety of Cisco Nexus Switches and the ability to interconnect them to form a scalable topology provides the ability to aggregate traffic from multiple input TAP or SPAN ports, and replicate and forward traffic to multiple monitoring tools which may be connected across different switches. Using the Cisco NX-API agent to communicate to the switches, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker provides advance features for traffic management.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker provides management support for multiple disjointed Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker networks. You can manage multiple Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker topologies that may be disjointed using the same application instance. For example, if you have 5 data centers and want to deploy an independent solution for each data center, you can manage all 5 independent deployments using a single application instance by creating a logical partition (network slice) for each monitoring network.

Note

Beginning with Release 3.10.1, Cisco Nexus Data Broker (NDB) has been renamed to Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker. However, some instances of NDB are present in this document, to correspond with the GUI, and installation folder structure. References of NDB/ Nexus Data Broker/ Nexus Dashboard Data Broker can be used interchangeably.

See the relevant Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker Release Notes for the latest matrix.

The following table lists the Python Activator scripts and corresponding NX-OS Image names:

Note	The activator scripts are availble for download at: https://github.com/datacenter/nexus-data-broker.

Note	Check the Guestshell version using the show guestshell command. If the Guestshell version is 2.2 or earlier, either upgrade the Guestshell or destroy and re-run the script to start NDB embedded.