Introduction to the DC Assurance demo lab

Welcome to the DC Assurance guided lab. This guide walks you through a fully configured demo environment where you can see Apstra Data Center Director and DC Assurance working together. Nothing needs to be configured — the environment is already running with live traffic. Your job is simply to explore, observe, and understand what you are seeing and why it matters.

This guide assumes you have live access to the DC Assurance demo environment. If you have not yet signed up, start with accessing the environment, which walks through the sign-up process.

What you will cover

This guide takes approximately 30 minutes to complete. You will move through six sections, each building on the last:

  1. Accessing the demo environment — how to sign in and find your way around

  2. Architecture overview — how DC Assurance, Apstra Data Center Director, and HPE Mist relate to each other

  3. Orientation — what the demo environment contains and how to read the topology

  4. Demo 1 – Service Level Expectations — measuring network health in terms of the experience it actually delivers

  5. Demo 2 – Correlated visibility — seeing infrastructure and live traffic data in the same view

  6. Demo 3 – Root cause analysis — how DC Assurance narrows down the source of a network issue

At the end of each section you will find a milestone summary — a moment to check your understanding before moving on.