Aviz Network Copilot details Cisco Catalyst Center Collector integration

Cisco Catalyst Center Collector for Network Copilot streams Catalyst Center assurance, inventory, interface counters, and topology into a single queryable workspace, reducing dashboard switching and manual exports for troubleshooting and operations teams.

Research Overview

The post describes an integration that brings data from Cisco Catalyst Center, formerly DNA Center, into Aviz Networks’ Network Copilot environment. It frames the problem as operational context being split across multiple tools, which adds time and manual steps during troubleshooting.

The described approach uses a dedicated collector to pull and stream Catalyst Center data and then exposes it to users through natural-language queries in the Copilot workspace. The integration is positioned as a way to make assurance and telemetry data continuously updated and easier to correlate with other operational sources.

Key Findings

According to the post, Catalyst Center data often remains siloed across inventory, assurance, and topology views. The blog states this fragmentation results in slower troubleshooting, increased manual effort, and reactive network operations.

The post says the integration addresses these issues by unifying Catalyst Center assurance into Network Copilot as real-time, queryable information. It also adds scoping through tags and supports natural-language queries rather than requiring operators to run API calls or use CSV exports.

Technical Breakdown

The collector is described as a microservice that connects to Catalyst Center APIs using credentials or tokens. It polls Catalyst Center on a configurable interval and then sends data into Kafka topics.

The blog lists the data elements streamed into Network Copilot, including device identity and software details, interface configuration and state, CPU and memory utilization, traffic and quality counters, hardware components, and topology node and link status. It also states that data is aligned to Network Copilot’s normalized schema to support consistent cross-source queries alongside syslogs, flows, and inventory data from other connectors.

Operational Impact

The post provides example workflows across several NetOps categories, including basic operational checks, inventory insights, health and assurance monitoring, topology-aware troubleshooting, and correlation between traffic and interface errors. It presents sample prompts that use a catalyst-core tag to scope queries.

Examples include identifying switch reboots within the last 24 hours, listing devices with recent operational status changes, checking high CPU or memory utilization over the last 24 hours, and identifying links down within the Catalyst fabric. The blog also includes correlation examples such as relating interface errors with traffic spikes and checking for link flaps during a peak flow window.

The blog’s central claim is that Cisco Catalyst Center assurance and telemetry become structured, continuously updated, and queryable within Network Copilot, enabling automated checks and operator-led troubleshooting across inventory, interface counters, topology, and other operational data sources. This “Blog Signals brief” is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.