Cisco DNA-Spaces: Monitoring IOT Network

In today's pandemic, it is very difficult for businesses to plan occupancy in the office to provide a safe and COVID-free environment to their employees. Nowadays, businesses are planning to integrate some good tools that can provide or give actionable insights, which can further help them in planning occupancy monitoring, Air Quality testing, contract tracing, and in-room presence.

This can all be achieved by using Cisco DNA Space IOT Services. This product transforms business measures and interacts using an existing Wi-FI network Environment to provide actionable insights and drive business outcomes.

These are all achieved by consuming tons of data and working with a plethora of devices. The key components of this solution are: Cisco DNA Spaces IOT Services, Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers, Cisco Access Points, and IOT Partner Eco Systems.

• Partner Devices: These are the partner’s sensors, which broadcast their measurement data over the air.
• Gateways: Cisco Access Points used for Sensors measurements. They securely communicate to partner devices, sometimes, the gateway also broadcasts the data.
• Controllers: They act as a trust point between Gateways and Cloud.
• Connectors: It connects on-prem gateways to DNA Spaces cloud and also performs edge processing.
• DNA Spaces IoT Services:  Provides intelligence services to sensors data, allows partner clouds to communicate securely with partner devices.

Below Network architecture demonstrates that Access points communicate with the connector over a gRPC data plane while it communicates with the Controller over a CAPWAP control plane.

In this solution, partner devices broadcast either time-driven data or event-driven data with high frequency. As an example, per device transmission rate varies widely from every 100 ms to once in several days. But on average an IOT devices process 300 million messages per day, and data volume keeps on increasing day by day.

Cisco DNA Spaces IOT device Monitoring helps in identifying and predicting issues in network IOT infrastructure.

Device Monitoring: DNA Spaces IOT Services monitors the IOT gateway present in the network and provides a quick snapshot when any gateway is down. It not only provides a total number of transmitting IOT devices but also provides how many devices are active currently.

Battery Monitoring: Because these IOT Sensors send or transmit a high volume of data, a large amount of battery usage is required, which causes device battery drainage. This further makes devices out of battery and causes IOT network failure. With the help of Cisco DNA Spaces, the tool tracks or identifies devices that have critical or low battery life and also provides information to locate devices on the map so that they can be easily identified and the battery can be changed.

Active device Count: DNA Space also counts devices that are scanned in the last 5 minutes. If it counts too many devices, it may indicate unmitigated rouge transmission on the network, and if it counts too few active devices, it may indicate malfunctioning devices or a data channel setup issue.

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