Cisco added new network insight capabilities to its data center portfolio that the vendor says makes networking operations proactive rather than reactive. It’s another step closer to a fully automated, self-correcting network, or what Cisco and others call intent-based networking.

More specifically, Cisco says the network insight capabilities guarantee reliability by fixing potential network problems before they hurt business, and the features provide intelligent troubleshooting to highlight any issues.

Cisco’s Thomas Scheibe, VP of data center product management for the Intent Based Networking Group, spoke exclusively to SDxCentral about the new Day 2 network operations capabilities, which are now available to all existing Cisco data center customers.

“For the network operator, this helps them improve their experience in how they are managing networks today,” Scheibe said. “It helps them increase service availability and uptime, and obviously by doing so minimizes the time they spend on troubleshooting, and it offsets operational costs.”

And, he added, “we wanted to make sure we’re not building tools for silos.”

To that end, the same set of tools work across Cisco ACI fabrics that extend into public clouds and NX-OS network operating systems for the Nexus-series Ethernet switches. This means it covers both multi-cloud and on-premises data center environments. “The way applications are built, you are going to have a much more distributed environment. And the infrastructure is clearly a shared infrastructure,” Scheibe said. “So the ability to figure out the needle in the haystack proactively is much more important than it used to be.”

The insight tools build on the network-assurance capabilities Cisco added to its intent-based networking portfolio two years ago. Assurance continuously verifies the network is operating as intended.

In terms of intent-based networking, “from a data-center space, [network insights] is one of the last items that we, quite frankly, needed to apply. It’s a normal evolution,” that started with data center network automation, then extended to multiple clouds including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and then progressed to network intent with the assurance software, Scheibe said.

Network insights gives customers “a tooling set that helps with proactive monitoring of service levels and better troubleshooting capabilities,” he added “That’s the piece [of intent-based networking] we are filling in. I’m not retiring, but I think we closed up the circle at this point.”