Monitoring ACI, as with anything, will be a mixture of reactive and proactive steps. We can be reactive, looking for faults and events that may explain some unexpected behavior--we may need to look through audit logs to find who did what--or we can be proactive. We can set up Call Home (or CallHome, as it is sometimes written) to send us (and Cisco TAC) alerts, and we can also pull data out of ACI, giving us metrics for utilization and uptime through SNMP. We can retain logs for compliance reasons, and lastly, we can export our flow data (the conversation between two endpoints) using NetFlow.
We will do all of that in this chapter.