Cisco Digital Network Architecture offers centralized, intuitive management that makes it fast and easy to design, provision, and apply policies across your network environment. The Cisco DNA Center GUI provides end-to-end network visibility and uses network insights to optimize network performance and deliver the best user and application experience.

After you log in, Cisco DNA Center displays its home page. The home page has the following main areas: Assurance Summary, Network Snapshot, Network Configuration, and Tools.

The Assurance Summary area includes:

• Health: Provides the health score of your overall enterprise, which includes network devices, wired clients, and wireless clients. Clicking View Details takes you to the Overall Health window.

• Critical Issues: Provides the count of P1 and P2 issues. Clicking View Details takes you to the Open Issues window.

  • P1: Critical issues that need immediate attention before they cause a wider impact on network operations.

  • P2: Major issues that can potentially impact multiple devices or clients.

• Trends and Insights: Provides insights about the performance of your network. Clicking View Details takes you to the Network Insights window.

The Network Snapshot area includes:

• Sites: Provides the number of sites discovered on your network along with the number of DNS and NTP servers. Clicking Add Sites takes you to the Add Site window.

• Network Devices: Provides the number of network devices discovered on your network along with the number of unclaimed, unprovisioned, and unreachable devices. Clicking Find New Devices takes you to the New Discovery window.

• Application Policies: Provides the number of application policies discovered on your network along with the number of successful and errored deployments. Clicking Add New Policy takes you to the Application Policies window.

• Network Profiles: Provides the number of profiles discovered on your network. Clicking Manage Profiles takes you to the Network Profiles window.

• Images: Provides the number of images discovered on your network along with the number of untagged and unverified images. Clicking Import Images/SMUs takes you to the Image Repository window.

• Licensed Devices: Provides the number of devices that have a Cisco DNA Center license along with the number of switches, routers, and access points. Clicking Manage Licenses takes you to the License Management window.

The Network Configuration area includes:

• Design: Create the structure and framework of your network, including the physical topology, network settings, and device type profiles that you can apply to devices throughout your network.

• Policy: Create policies that reflect your organization's business intent for a particular aspect of the network, such as network access. Cisco DNA Center takes the information collected in a policy and translates it into network-specific and device-specific configurations required by the different types, makes, models, operating systems, roles, and resource constraints of your network devices.

• Provision: Prepare and configure devices, including adding devices to sites, assigning devices to the inventory, deploying the required settings and policies, creating fabric domains, and adding devices to the fabric.

• Assurance: Provide proactive and predictive actionable insights about the performance and health of the network infrastructure, applications, and end-user clients.

• Platform: Allows you to programmatically access your network through Intent APIs, integrate with your preferred IT systems to create end-to-end solutions, and add support for multivendor devices.

Tools: Use the Tools area to configure and manage your network.

Different Views of Home Page:

Getting Started

When you log in to Cisco DNA Center for the first time as a Network Administrator or System Administrator, or when there are no devices in the system, you see the following dashlet. Click Get Started and complete the getting started workflow to discover new devices in your network.

When you log in to Cisco DNA Center for the first time as an Observer, you see the following message:

Day 0 Home Page

If you skipped getting started, or when there are no devices in the system, you see the following home page.

When discovery is in progress, you see a progress message with a link to the Discovery window.

When there are devices in the system, you see a network snapshot of discovered devices.

Click the Menu icon () at the top-left corner of the home page to access the following menus:

• Design

• Policy

• Provision

• Assurance

• Workflows

• Tools

• Platform

• Activity

• System

Click the icons at the top- and bottom-right corner of the home page to perform common tasks:

If you are new to Cisco DNA Center, see Where to Start for tips and suggestions on how to begin.

Note	By default, the login name you provided is displayed in the Welcome text. To change the name, click the name link; for example, admin. You are taken to the User Management window, where you can edit the display name.

Use the global Search function to find items in the following categories anywhere in Cisco DNA Center:

• Activities: Search for Cisco DNA Center menu items, workflows, and features by name.

• Applications: Search for them by name.

• Application Groups: Search for them by name.

• Authentication template: Search for them by name or type.

• Devices: Search for them by collection status, reachability status, location, or tag.

• Fabric: Search by fabric name.

• Hosts and Endpoints: Search for them by name, IP address, or MAC address.

• IP Pools: Search for them by name or IP address.

• Network Devices: Search for them by name, IP address, serial number, software version, platform, product family, or MAC address.

• Network Profiles: Search by profile name.

• Network Settings

  • Device Credentials: Search by name.

  • IP Address Pools: Search for them by group name or pool CIDR.

  • Service Provider Profiles: Search for them by profile name, WAN provider, or model.

• Policy: Search for them by name or description.

• Sites: Search for them by name.

• Traffic copy: Search for them by name and description.

• Transits: Search by transit name.

• Users: Search for the system settings and users by username. Case-insensitivity and substring search are not supported for usernames.

• Other items, as new versions of Cisco DNA Center are released.

To start a global Search, click the icon in the top-right corner of any Cisco DNA Center page. Cisco DNA Center displays a pop-up global search window, with a Search field where you can begin entering identifying information about an item.

You can enter all or part of the target item's name, address, serial number, or other identifying information. The Search field is case-insensitive and can contain any character or combination of characters.

As you begin entering your search string, Cisco DNA Center displays a list of possible search targets that match your entry. If more than one category of item matches your search string, Cisco DNA Center sorts them by category, with a maximum of five items in each category. The first item in the first category is selected automatically, and summary information for that item appears in the summary panel on the right.

You can scroll the list as needed, and click any of the suggested search targets to see information for that item in the summary panel. If there are more than five items in a category, click View All next to the category name. To return to the categorized list from the complete list of search targets, click Go Back.

As you add more characters to the search string, global Search automatically narrows the displayed list.

The summary panel includes links to more information. The link varies as appropriate for each category and item. For example, with Activities, the summary panel displays links to menu items and workflows elsewhere in the Cisco DNA Center system. For Applications, there is the Application 360 view. You will see links to Client 360 and Topology views for hosts and endpoints, and links to Device 360 and Topology views for network devices.

When you are finished, click to close the window.

Global search can display five results per category at a time.

To start using Cisco DNA Center, you must first configure the Cisco DNA Center settings so that the server can communicate outside the network.

After you configure the settings, your current environment determines how you start using Cisco DNA Center:

• Existing infrastructure: If you have an existing infrastructure (brownfield deployment), start by running Discovery. After you run Discovery, all your devices are displayed on the Inventory window.

• New or nonexisting infrastructure: If you have no existing infrastructure and are starting from scratch (greenfield deployment), create a network hierarchy.