Reference: Common questions

The answer comes down to data quality. Any analysis is only as good as the data it works from.

Most monitoring tools apply machine learning to a stream of raw metrics — a device reports CPU utilisation, an interface reports packet counts, and the tool watches for values that look unusual. This works, but it has no structural awareness. It cannot tell you that the device reporting high CPU is a spine switch serving hundreds of downstream devices, or that the traffic it is processing belongs to a specific virtual network serving a specific set of workloads. The significance of a condition depends entirely on context that raw metrics do not carry.

DC Assurance works from the Apstra Data Center Director graph database, which holds full structural context for every element in the fabric — the role of each device, its connections, its intended configuration, and its relationship to every other element in the network. The machine learning operates on contextually enriched data rather than raw streams. This is why DC Assurance produces fewer false positives and more actionable insights. A traditional monitoring tool sees a stream of numbers. DC Assurance sees a network.

DC Assurance runs on the same cloud infrastructure as HPE Mist — a platform with over ten years of operational experience running AIOps for wireless and wired networks at enterprise scale. The data ingestion pipelines, the machine learning infrastructure, and the assurance frameworks that DC Assurance uses are the same ones that have been running in production at some of the largest enterprises in the world.

This is not a new product built on experimental infrastructure. It is a well-established platform applied to data centre fabric assurance, bringing the same operational maturity that organisations have relied on in their wireless and wired campus networks.

This guide covers the AIOps capabilities available in the product today: SLE scoring, correlated visibility, and root cause analysis. Additional capabilities are in development.

If you have questions about roadmap timing or specific features you would like to see, your account team can provide current positioning. The right approach is always to be clear about what the product does today — the current capabilities are substantial — and straightforward about what is not yet available.

Rather than making direct comparisons, it is more useful to understand the structural difference in approach.

Any tool that does not have access to Apstra Data Center Director’s graph database is working with incomplete information. It may have topology data from discovery scans, but discovery-based topology is always a snapshot — it does not know the intended state of the network, the policy configuration, or the relationship between every element in the fabric with the same depth that Apstra’s model provides.

The key question to ask is whether your monitoring tool has access to the intended state of your fabric — what your network is supposed to look like and how it is supposed to behave — or whether it works from discovery data alone. For most tools, the honest answer is discovery data alone. DC Assurance starts with the full intended model.

A few practical areas worth knowing about.

User roles and access control — DC Assurance supports role-based access, allowing organisations to control who can view data, who can configure alerts, and who has administrative access to platform settings.

SSO configuration — the platform supports single sign-on via standard enterprise identity providers. If your organisation already has SSO infrastructure in place, integration is straightforward.

Webhooks for integration with third-party systems — DC Assurance can push event data to external systems via webhooks, enabling integration with ITSM tools, Slack, PagerDuty, and similar platforms. If you want to connect DC Assurance to your existing SIEM or incident management workflow, webhooks are the current mechanism.

APIs — the platform exposes APIs for querying health data, pulling event history, and automating alert configuration. API access is available today.

Alert notifications — alerts can be sent via email to named recipients or distribution lists or webhooks for integration with third-party systems.

No — DC Assurance adds a layer of intelligence on top of existing infrastructure. Flow data can typically be forwarded from existing network devices without changes to the network configuration. Apstra Data Center Director integration uses the Apstra API. Webhooks enable output to existing ITSM and alerting tools. The integration story is additive.

You retain full access to your existing tools. What DC Assurance adds is the correlated view: topology and traffic in the same place, with structural context already attached.