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Cisco APIC Discovery

Overview

Starting from version 5.0, IP Fabric collects information from APIC controllers and provides information about Tenants (including Contexts/VRFs, Applications, Endpoint groups, and Contracts) and APIC cluster members.

Discovery Process

To successfully discover and collect data from Cisco ACI and APIC, follow these steps:

  1. Discover Spine and Leaf Switches
  2. Add APIC Controllers to SSH Discovery
  3. Configure APIC in Vendor API Settings

1. Discover Spine and Leaf Switches

First, you need to discover all spines and leaves (which are Nexus 9000 series switches) using SSH. This step is crucial for collecting data about the ACI fabric.

  • Add the IP addresses of all spine and leaf switches to your discovery seeds.
  • Ensure you have proper SSH credentials configured for these devices.

Benefits:

  • Populates data in the Technology tables under SDN → ACI, including:
    • ACI Endpoints
    • ACI VLANs
    • ACI VRFs
    • ACI DTEPs
  • Enables end-to-end path simulation using the collected dataplane information.

2. Add APIC Controllers to SSH Discovery

To successfully discover the APIC, you need to add the APIC controllers to your SSH discovery as well. This step creates network device entries in IP Fabric’s inventory, which are necessary to link the controller data.

  • Add the IP addresses of all APIC controllers to your discovery seeds.
  • Ensure you have proper SSH credentials configured for the APIC controllers.

3. Configure APIC in Vendor API Settings

After discovering the fabric and controllers via SSH, configure the APIC in the Vendor API settings to extract additional data over API.

  1. Go to Settings → Discovery & Snapshots → Discovery Settings → Vendors API.
  2. Click + Add.
  3. Select Cisco APIC from the list.

  4. Fill in the following information:

    • Username and Password used to log in to Cisco APIC.
    • Base URL of Cisco APIC (e.g., https://cisco-apic-ip-address).

    • Slug (optional).

      Username if Local Domain Is Set on the APIC

      If a local domain is set on your APIC controller, the format of the Username for IP Fabric settings is: 

      apic:LOCAL-DOMAIN-NAME\\username
      APIC login screen IP Fabric settings - Username

  5. Click Save to add the configuration.

Add Connection - Cisco APIC

Benefits:

  • Adds additional information into the tables in the section SDN → APIC.
  • Provides more detailed insights into the ACI fabric configuration and policies.

By following these steps, you’ll ensure comprehensive discovery and data collection from your Cisco ACI environment, including both the fabric devices and the APIC controllers.

Experimental Features

ACI Service Graphs

Since 6.4.0, ACI service graphs can be enabled via feature flag.